Railscasts - Generating RSS Feeds

#87

Jan 06, 2008

44 comments

Generating RSS Feeds

See how to easily generate and link to an RSS feed using new features in Rails 2.0. Watch this episode or details.

Tags: views routing

Download (12.4 MB, 6:06)

alternative download for iPod & Apple TV (8.1 MB, 6:06)

Also See

atom_feed_helper

Mentioned

Advanced Rails Recipes

# index.rss.builder
xml.instruct! :xml, :version => "1.0" 
xml.rss :version => "2.0" do
  xml.channel do
    xml.title "Articles"
    xml.description "Lots of articles"
    xml.link formatted_articles_url(:rss)
    
    for article in @articles
      xml.item do
        xml.title article.name
        xml.description article.content
        xml.pubDate article.created_at.to_s(:rfc822)
        xml.link formatted_article_url(article, :rss)
        xml.guid formatted_article_url(article, :rss)
      end
    end
  end
end

<!-- index.html.erb -->
<%= link_to "RSS Feed", formatted_articles_url(:rss) %>

$ rake routes

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44 comments

1. Olli Jan 07, 2008 at 01:58

I can't download the episodes :(

2. Olli Jan 07, 2008 at 01:59

Hm the wget download works - it seems it is browser problem on my side.

3. Nirmit Jan 07, 2008 at 02:13

It worked for me....great episode as usual...keep up the excellent work

4. Mislav Jan 07, 2008 at 02:57

It's strange that you decided not to mention Atom and atom helper in Rails 2.0 at all

5. Sam Jan 07, 2008 at 04:13

I found myself forced to use a respond_to cause I specify a layout for my controller

I have

layout "simple", :except => :index

and then

respond_to do |format|
      format.html { render :layout => "simple"}
      format.rss { render }
    end

I hope I'm missing something ...

6. Ryan Bates Jan 07, 2008 at 09:49

@Mislav, I had completely forgotten about atom_feed_helper. That certainly would be a better solution. I'll link to it in the show notes. Thanks!

@Sam, I think you'll have to keep that respond_to block if you are specifying a custom layout. Alternatively you can rename the layout to "application" or the name of the controller so it will be picked up by default. That may not work in your situation though.

7. David Parker Jan 07, 2008 at 13:52

Great stuff Ryan! Everyday I explore just a little more Rails 2.0 stuff. Keep up the good work.

8. Dorky McDorkison Jan 07, 2008 at 14:27

Q: What did they call Ryan in Highschool?

A: Master Bates!

Kiddin! Your my hero, Ryan. <3 Keep it up.

9. Bodaniel Jeanes Jan 07, 2008 at 19:02

Great work! You have an incredible talent for teaching. I watch many screencasts but I can honestly say I don't anticipate watching any of them as much as yours. Thanks to you I even bought a 10-pack of peepcode screencasts which are quite good. But I still prefer your style and content. You seem to know exactly what to explain further as if you had JUST figured out how to do it and it was fresh in your mind and exciting.

Enough blabbering but thanks a lot for your commitment -- I am positive there are many out there like me who appreciate it.

10. David Jan 08, 2008 at 03:56

How can i get on itunes all episodes from railscasts ipod version ? I ask that because i can only download from 87 to 58.

Best regards!

11. Nicolás Sanguinetti Jan 08, 2008 at 10:05

And don't forget the auto_discovery_link_tag helper :)
Great episode, as always :)

http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActionView/Helpers/AssetTagHelper.html#M001021

12. limeyd Jan 08, 2008 at 10:31

what can I say, every cast is just great you really bring to light the features of rails I've been learning so much of the past months.

Keep them coming

13. Sumit Jan 08, 2008 at 11:18

Have you had any problems with bad characters getting into the RSS feed? Im curious if there'something already built to parse out these bad characters (like if someone copied and pasted text into the article content from a MS Word doc)?

14. Cupertino Jan 09, 2008 at 16:15

@David: If you are having trouble seeing ALL the Railscasts, you can add the podcast manually from within iTunes. Just select "Subscribe to Podcast" from the Advanced menu within iTunes, then paste the full rss feed (feed://feeds.feedburner.com/railscasts) into the box. Once you click OK it should list ALL the railscasts.
(If not, try 'unsubscribing', deleting, and then follow the above instructions to 'reset' the list.)

15. Cupertino Jan 09, 2008 at 16:17

@David: Oh, the iPod version works too. Just use

feed://feeds.feedburner.com/railscasts_ipod

for the feed address. :D

16. Ryan Bates Jan 10, 2008 at 18:27

@David, Yeah, I still need to fix the iPod feed. Thanks for reminding me. :)

@Sumit, I believe XMLBuilder automatically escapes the strange characters.

17. maninred Jan 11, 2008 at 02:59

Thanks Bates.

It will be more convenience that have a link to the next episode in the page.

18. Neeraj Kumar Jan 17, 2008 at 12:53

I need to write the feed to a file and others will pick that file ( this file is public).

One way to do is to do page caching. I could also use curl but I would like to store the output of builder in string and then store the file right there rather than using curl or anything.

How can I get the output of the builder in a string.

19. David Backeus Jan 26, 2008 at 03:12

I noticed that if my application is set to use a layout (in my case 'xhtml') I will run into this error message when attempting to see the rss format:

Missing layout layouts/xhtml.rss.erb in view path

Is there a clean DRY way to tell rails to not use layouts on certain formats? The only way I could think of was to go back to the old not very DRY respond_to stuff. Or just creating a one line yeilding layout but that seemed more like a work around.

20. David Backeus Jan 26, 2008 at 03:19

Sorry, just noticed my question had already been asked. Must have mistyped the ctrl+f in firefox searching for layout ;)

21. Jon Feb 23, 2008 at 16:05

Whenever I try to view http://localhost:3006/pages.rss I get the error:

No route matches "/pages.rss" with {:method=>:get}

I cannot seem to work out where in my routes this is going wrong?

Also when I map.resources :pages it makes 'show' the default view instead of index!

Help?!

22. nicos Mar 26, 2008 at 06:08

I also had to add a custom respond to block to turn off the layout. E.g.
respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.xml { render :xml => @articles.to_xml }
      format.rss { render :layout=>false}

    end

23. joel Mar 31, 2008 at 10:29

Hi,

Really great tutorials, as always.

How do I apply styling to the feeds.

Thanks in advance

24. Peter Hollows Apr 19, 2008 at 03:24

Hey, love the spiels you cast. Can't get enough of them.

For those with layout issues. If you've defined a layout in application.rb for use site-wide, like application.html.haml or simple.html.erb, then just make another like application.rss.builder or simple.rss.builder (following your convention) using the following code:

xml.instruct! :xml, :version => '1.0'
xml.rss(:version => '2.0') do
xml << yield
end

Put the rest of the RSS code in your index.rss.builder view. Now you can remove the render call and keep your project DRY.

The only downside is builder doesn't indent the yield section of XML -- but that does save you two bytes per item line on output :)

25. Tom Harrison May 03, 2008 at 14:36

Ryan --

Thanks for everything you do.

I wanted to point out an issue with atom_feed_helper in Rails 2.0.2 ... it has a bug or two, which have been fixed now on edge Rails.

If I were to do it again, I would not use atom_feed_helper -- RSS seems to me more widely accepted in various readers. Perhaps being "really simple" is a virtue :-)

26. kino May 04, 2008 at 03:31

Really great tutorials, as always.

27. Dave May 12, 2008 at 09:43

Don't forget Mofo: http://errtheblog.com/posts/78-feeds-for-free.

It promises a way of talking Atom without writing separate Atom views.

28. Darren Jun 25, 2008 at 12:25

Thanks Ryan, so simple! I love your episodes so much. @Nicolás Sanguinetti thanks for the auto_discovery_link_tag.

29. Walter Jul 16, 2008 at 14:49

Thanks for a great railscast, I got it working in a lot less time than I thought.

One issue I'm having, is that it will only display the first 7 posts in firefox but in opera it gets all 11. I have repeated the xml.channel do block to also add additional posts as i have both title and title_japanese etc. All works fine except that in firefox it only show one block (either english or japanese) but not both like opera.

any way to have the feed display all articles? For example Railscasts displays all, not 7, so I'm a little stumped.

30. Walter Jul 16, 2008 at 15:19

http://railsforum.com/viewtopic.php?pid=68710#p68710

railsforum post of the above question in more detail.

31. Tadd Giles Jul 19, 2008 at 18:41

Excellent and helpful as always. Thanks Ryan!

32. John Jul 31, 2008 at 21:55

I want to add the name of the author for each item. How do I do that?

33. Ryan S Sep 10, 2008 at 11:16

I've copied the code because I'm wanting to use it for my article rss and when I click on the RSS bookmark feed, I get redirected to http://localhost:3000/articles/1.rss with a blank screen. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Ryan S

34. Anthony Ettinger Oct 01, 2008 at 20:46

Works great...I had to do the format.rss { render :layout => false }

Also, the feed doesn't validate 100%:

http://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/warning/MissingAtomSelfLink.html

I could not figure out how to generate:

<atom:link ... >

xml tag.

35. Dave A. Oct 22, 2008 at 18:19

I'm having the same problem as Ryan S. -- I get .rss appended to links coming out of my RSS feed. Has anyone figured this out?

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good, thanks

37. Sean K. Nov 16, 2008 at 09:33

I have learned so much and enjoyed every Railscast I have watched. Thank you for being so kick ass Ryan Bates!

Also on this particular article thank you Peter Hollows for the layout advice. I had the layout not found problem, so I make an empty layout then I was getting some XML element not found error. Your solution solved my problem.

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Thanks Bates.

It will be more convenience that have a link to the next episode in the page.

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Generating RSS Feeds

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