A Jekyll plugin to generate an Atom (RSS-like) feed of your Jekyll posts
Add this line to your site's Gemfile:
gem 'jekyll-feed'And then add this line to your site's _config.yml:
plugins:
- jekyll-feedgems key instead of plugins.
The plugin will automatically generate an Atom feed at /feed.xml.
The plugin will automatically use any of the following configuration variables, if they are present in your site's _config.yml file.
titleorname- 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 usesite.github.url.author- Global author information (see below)
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.atomTo 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.
The plugin will use the following post metadata, automatically generated by Jekyll, which you can override via a post's YAML front matter:
datetitleexcerptidcategorytags
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 asimage.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.
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:
- An
authorobject, in the document's front matter, e.g.:
author:
twitter: benbalter- An
authorobject, in the site's_config.yml, e.g.:
author:
twitter: benbaltersite.data.authors[author], if an author is specified in the document's front matter, and a corresponding key exists insite.data.authors. E.g., you have the following in the document's front matter:
author: benbalterAnd you have the following in _data/authors.yml:
benbalter:
picture: /img/benbalter.png
twitter: jekyllrb
potus:
picture: /img/potus.png
twitter: whitehouseIn 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.
- An author in the document's front matter (the simplest way), e.g.:
author: benbalter- An author in the site's
_config.yml, e.g.:
author: benbalterThe 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.
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: ...}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.
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.
Jekyll Feed can generate feeds for each category. Simply define which categories you'd like feeds for in your config:
feed:
categories:
- news
- updatesBy default the plugin limits the number of posts in the feed to 10. Simply define a new limit in your config:
feed:
posts_limit: 20Jekyll 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:
- changesBy 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
- updatesOptional 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: trueThe 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.
To automatically generate feeds for each tag you apply to your posts you can add a tags setting to your config:
feed:
tags: trueIf there are tags you don't want included in this auto generation you can exclude them
feed:
tags:
except:
- tag-to-exclude
- another-tagIf 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-tagNote that if you include a tag that is excluded a feed will not be generated for it.
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- Fork it (https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed/fork)
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b my-new-feature) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Add some feature') - Push to the branch (
git push origin my-new-feature) - Create a new Pull Request