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Jekyll Feed plugin

A Jekyll plugin to generate an Atom (RSS-like) feed of your Jekyll posts

Continuous Integration Gem Version

Installation

Add this line to your site's Gemfile:

gem 'jekyll-feed'

And then add this line to your site's _config.yml:

plugins:
  - jekyll-feed

⚠️ If you are using Jekyll < 3.5.0 use the gems key instead of plugins.

Usage

The plugin will automatically generate an Atom feed at /feed.xml.

Optional configuration options

The plugin will automatically use any of the following configuration variables, if they are present in your site's _config.yml file.

  • title or name - The title of the site, e.g., "My awesome site"
  • description - A longer description of what your site is about, e.g., "Where I blog about Jekyll and other awesome things"
  • url - The URL to your site, e.g., https://example.com. If none is provided, the plugin will try to use site.github.url.
  • author - Global author information (see below)

Already have a feed path?

Do you already have an existing feed someplace other than /feed.xml, but are on a host like GitHub Pages that doesn't support machine-friendly redirects? If you simply swap out jekyll-feed for your existing template, your existing subscribers won't continue to get updates. Instead, you can specify a non-default path via your site's config.

feed:
  path: /blog/feed.atom

To note, you shouldn't have to do this unless you already have a feed you're using, and you can't or wish not to redirect existing subscribers.

Optional front matter

The plugin will use the following post metadata, automatically generated by Jekyll, which you can override via a post's YAML front matter:

  • date
  • title
  • excerpt
  • id
  • category
  • tags

Additionally, the plugin will use the following values, if present in a post's YAML front matter:

  • image - URL of an image that is representative of the post (can also be passed as image.path)

  • author - The author of the post, e.g., "Dr. Jekyll". If none is given, feed readers will look to the feed author as defined in _config.yml. Like the feed author, this can also be an object or a reference to an author in _data/authors.yml (see below).

  • description - A short description of the post.

Author information

TL;DR: In most cases, put author: [your name] in the document's front matter, for sites with multiple authors. If you need something more complicated, read on.

There are several ways to convey author-specific information. Author information is found in the following order of priority:

  1. An author object, in the document's front matter, e.g.:
author:
  twitter: benbalter
  1. An author object, in the site's _config.yml, e.g.:
author:
  twitter: benbalter
  1. site.data.authors[author], if an author is specified in the document's front matter, and a corresponding key exists in site.data.authors. E.g., you have the following in the document's front matter:
author: benbalter

And you have the following in _data/authors.yml:

benbalter:
  picture: /img/benbalter.png
  twitter: jekyllrb

potus:
  picture: /img/potus.png
  twitter: whitehouse

In the above example, the author benbalter's Twitter handle will be resolved to @jekyllrb. This allows you to centralize author information in a single _data/authors file for site with many authors that require more than just the author's username.

Pro-tip: If authors is present in the document's front matter as an array (and author is not), the plugin will use the first author listed.

  1. An author in the document's front matter (the simplest way), e.g.:
author: benbalter
  1. An author in the site's _config.yml, e.g.:
author: benbalter

Meta tags

The plugin exposes a helper tag to expose the appropriate meta tags to support automated discovery of your feed. Simply place {% feed_meta %} someplace in your template's <head> section, to output the necessary metadata.

SmartyPants

The plugin uses Jekyll's smartify filter for processing the site title and post titles. This will translate plain ASCII punctuation into "smart" typographic punctuation. This will not render or strip any Markdown you may be using in a title.

Jekyll's smartify filter uses kramdown as a processor. Accordingly, if you do not want "smart" typographic punctuation, disabling them in kramdown in your _config.yml will disable them in your feed. For example:

kramdown:
  smart_quotes:               apos,apos,quot,quot
  typographic_symbols:        {hellip: ...}

Custom styling

Want to style what your feed looks like in the browser? When a XSLT Styleheet file named feed.xslt.xml exists at the root of your repository, a link to this stylesheet is added to the generated feed.

Why Atom, and not RSS?

Great question. In short, Atom is a better format. Think of it like RSS 3.0. For more information, see this discussion on why we chose Atom over RSS 2.0.

Categories

Jekyll Feed can generate feeds for each category. Simply define which categories you'd like feeds for in your config:

feed:
  categories:
    - news
    - updates

Posts limit

By default the plugin limits the number of posts in the feed to 10. Simply define a new limit in your config:

feed:
  posts_limit: 20

Collections

Jekyll Feed can generate feeds for collections other than the Posts collection. This works best for chronological collections (e.g., collections with dates in the filenames). Simply define which collections you'd like feeds for in your config:

feed:
  collections:
    - changes

By default, collection feeds will be outputted to /feed/<COLLECTION>.xml. If you'd like to customize the output path, specify a collection's custom path as follows:

feed:
  collections:
    changes:
      path: "/changes.atom"

Finally, collections can also have category feeds that are outputted as /feed/<COLLECTION>/<CATEGORY>.xml. Specify categories like so:

feed:
  collections:
    changes:
      path: "/changes.atom"
      categories:
        - news
        - updates

Excerpt Only flag

Optional flag excerpt_only allows you to exclude post content from the Atom feed. Default value is false for backward compatibility.

When in config.yml is true then all posts in feed will be without <content> tags.

feed:
  excerpt_only: true

The same flag can be used directly in post file. It will disable <content> tag for selected post. Settings in post file have higher priority than in config file.

Tags

To automatically generate feeds for each tag you apply to your posts you can add a tags setting to your config:

feed:
  tags: true

If there are tags you don't want included in this auto generation you can exclude them

feed:
  tags:
    except:
      - tag-to-exclude
      - another-tag

If you wish to change the location of these auto generated feeds (/feed/by_tag/<TAG>.xml by default) you can provide an alternative folder for them to live in.

feed:
  tags:
    path: "alternative/path/for/tags/feeds/"

If you only want to generate feeds for a few tags you can also set this.

feed:
  tags:
    only:
      - tag-to-include
      - another-tag

Note that if you include a tag that is excluded a feed will not be generated for it.

Skip development

Use disable_in_development: true if you want to turn off feed generation when jekyll.environment == "development", but don't want to remove the plugin (so you don't accidentally commit the removal). Default value is false.

feed:
  disable_in_development: true

Contributing

  1. Fork it (https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed/fork)
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create a new Pull Request