Create RSS from your ruby on rails application

Ruby on Rails, SEO,

For one my recent project need RSS feed. So I have created myself.

This will show you how to create a RSS feed that the Feed Validator considers valid.

First create a FeedsController to host the RSS feed.

class FeedsController < ApplicationController

  layout false

  def rss
    @posts = Post.published_posts.limit(50)
  end

end

Then create a view in views/feeds/rss.rss.builder for RSS.

xml.instruct!
xml.rss :version => '2.0', 'xmlns:atom' => 'http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' do

  xml.channel do
    xml.title 'Feed title'
    xml.description 'Feed description'
    xml.link root_url
    xml.language 'en'
    xml.tag! 'atom:link', :rel => 'self', :type => 'application/rss+xml', :href => posts_url

    for post in @posts
      xml.item do
        xml.title post.title
        xml.category post.category.name
        xml.pubDate(post.created_at.rfc2822)
        xml.link post_url(post)
        xml.guid post_url(post)
        xml.description(h(post.body))
        xml.image_url post.image_url
      end
    end

  end

end

Create a route to the feed in config/routes.rb:

get 'feed.rss', to: 'feeds#rss', :format => 'rss'

You can get browsers to auto-detect your Rails blog rss feed with a single line of Ruby on Rails code:

<%= auto_discovery_link_tag(:rss, "http://example.com") %>

That’s it.

Happy Coding 🙂

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