Breaking RSS Change in Hugo

30 Sep 2017

This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

My website and blog are managed by the static site generator Hugo. I’ve found this to be a stable and flexible system, but at the last upgrade a breaking change has occurred that broken the syndication of my blog on various planets.

At first I thought perhaps with my increased posting rate the planets were truncating my posts but this was not the case. The problem was in Hugo pull request #3129 where for some reason they have changed the RSS feed to contain only a “lead” instead of the full article.

I’ve seen other content management systems offer a similar option but at least they point out that it’s truncated and offer a “read more” link. Here it just looks like I’m publishing truncated unfinished really short posts.

If you take a look at the post above, you’ll see that the change is in an embedded template and it took a little reading the docs to work out how to revert the change. The steps are actually not that difficult, but it’s still annoying that the change occurred.

In a Hugo site, you will have a layouts directory that will contain your overrides from your theme. Create a new file in the path layouts/_default/rss.xml (you may need to create the _default directory) with the following content:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <channel>
    <title>{{ if eq  .Title  .Site.Title }}{{ .Site.Title }}{{ else }}{{ with .Title }}{{.}} on {{ end }}{{ .Site.Title }}{{ end }}</title>
    <link>{{ .Permalink }}</link>
    <description>Recent content {{ if ne  .Title  .Site.Title }}{{ with .Title }}in {{.}} {{ end }}{{ end }}on {{ .Site.Title }}</description>
    <generator>Hugo -- gohugo.io</generator>{{ with .Site.LanguageCode }}
    <language>{{.}}</language>{{end}}{{ with .Site.Author.email }}
    <managingEditor>{{.}}{{ with $.Site.Author.name }} ({{.}}){{end}}</managingEditor>{{end}}{{ with .Site.Author.email }}
    <webMaster>{{.}}{{ with $.Site.Author.name }} ({{.}}){{end}}</webMaster>{{end}}{{ with .Site.Copyright }}
    <copyright>{{.}}</copyright>{{end}}{{ if not .Date.IsZero }}
    <lastBuildDate>{{ .Date.Format "Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:04:05 -0700" | safeHTML }}</lastBuildDate>{{ end }}
    {{ with .OutputFormats.Get "RSS" }}
        {{ printf "<atom:link href=%q rel=\"self\" type=%q />" .Permalink .MediaType | safeHTML }}
    {{ end }}
    {{ range .Data.Pages }}
    <item>
      <title>{{ .Title }}</title>
      <link>{{ .Permalink }}</link>
      <pubDate>{{ .Date.Format "Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:04:05 -0700" | safeHTML }}</pubDate>
      {{ with .Site.Author.email }}<author>{{.}}{{ with $.Site.Author.name }} ({{.}}){{end}}</author>{{end}}
      <guid>{{ .Permalink }}</guid>
      <description>{{ .Content | html }}</description>
    </item>
    {{ end }}
  </channel>
</rss>

If you like my new Hugo theme, please let me know and I’ll bump tidying it up and publishing it further up my todo list.

If you would like to contact me with comments, please send me an email.
If you would like to support my free software work, you can support me on Patreon or donate via PayPal.

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Breaking RSS Change in Hugo

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