Scheduled RSS Generator

Prerequisites

• Node.js - alternatively install using Homebrew
• Remote server - unless you want to run it on your own machine (Not recommended)

List of Node packages used

• node-xmlhttprequest - Fetches the data from a remote file on a server (AJAX).
• node-rss — For parsing and structuring the fetched data into a rss friendly format.
• node-schedule — For running the above process on a set interval (once a minute, hourly, daily, weekly, etc.).
• forever — Keeps the entire process alive and continuously running on the server. Otherwise we would need to run the script manually.
• forever-monitor — Allows us to set some rules for when running forever. Not vital but keeps things a bit more manageable.

Installation

Change to your desired directory

cd your-folder-path

Clone files from github

git clone [email protected]:MarcusSkov node-rss-forever-generator

Install the dependencies

npm install

Adding data source

Set a path to your data source, i.e. where the data is fetched from

xhr.open('GET', 'https://yoursite.com/file.json');

Grab the data you want in your feed. In this example a json file formated as plain text is converted to a javascript object.

var posts = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText);

Setting up RSS template

Channel

Define the RSS channel; parent content for all the RSS posts. The content here is usually static.

var feed = new RSS({
  title           : 'Title of your feed',
  description     : 'Description of your feed',
  site_url        : 'https://yourSite.com/',
  feed_url        : 'https://yourSite.com/feed.xml',
  image_url       : 'https://yourDomain/images/rss_image.png', // Optional - Thumbnail
  docs            : 'https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html', // Optional
  managingEditor  : 'editor@yourCompany', // Optional
  webMaster       : 'webMaster@yourCompany', // Optional
  copyright       : 'year© yourCompany', // Optional
  language        : 'en', // Optional - Reference: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-language-codes // Optional
  categories      : ['category 1', 'category 2', 'category 3'], // Optional - E.g. design, news, cooking
  Pubdate         : 'Nov 29, 2016 04:00:00 GMT', // Optional - Date the RSS feed came online
  ttl             : '60', // Optional - How many minutes the channel is cached before being refreshed from the source
  custom_namespaces: { // Defines the media:content used below. This is required to make images defined in media:content to appear in some RSS aggregators
    'content' : 'http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/',
    'wfw'     : 'http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/',
    'itunes'  : 'http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd',
    'dc'      : 'http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/',
    'media'   : 'http://www.rssboard.org/media-rss'
  }
});

Posts

Add your data source to the feed.item. In the example below we're just pulling the information from a json file.

for (var key in posts) {
  feed.item({
    title       : posts[key].title,
    description : posts[key].description, // Post description
    url         : 'https://yourSite.com/' + posts[key].fullUrl, // Url to the full post
    date        : posts[key].date, // Optional - Date of publication,
    custom_elements: [{
      'media:content': {
        _attr: {
          url       : posts[key].assetUrl + '?format=yourSize', // '?format=' fetches a specific image size in cases where there are multple images in different sizes
          type      : posts[key].contentType, // Optional - E.g. image/jpeg, image/png, text/html // Optional
          medium    : 'image', // Optional
          isDefault : 'true', // Optional
          width     : '500', // Optional - Desired output width of image
          height    : 'auto' // Optional - Desired output height of image
        }
      }
    }]
  });
}

Further information

node-rss documentation

Set a schedule

This tells the script how often it should run. Can be anything from every minute to a specific time and day of the week.

The following example will run on Fridays at 6:55pm.

rule.minute     = 55; // Runs at 55 minutes past the hour
rule.hour       = 18; // Runs at 18 or 6pm
rule.dayOfWeek  =  5; // Runs on Fridays (0 = Monday, 6 = Sunday)

Note: Only one rule is required.

Further information

node-schedule documentation

Running tasks

Once all the RSS formatting is set up and a schedule has been declared, simply start the server with forever.

Starting forever

forever start forever.js

Once forever is running you can close terminal and it will continue running until you tell it to stop.

Stopping forever

forever stopall

or

forever stop forever.js

Further information

forever documentation

If everything has been formatted correctly you should have a newly generated XML file in your root folder of the repository. Open it in your browser and you have your very own, continuously generated, RSS feed.

Optional forever settings

If you want to have a bit more control over forever you can use forever-monitor to, e.g., make the script run a fixed number of times.

Further information

forever-monitor documentation