How To Create RSS Feeds In Golang

Introduction

In the era of digitalization, we have to keep our users up to date with frequently changing things in our applications.

One of the finest solutions is to use RSS(Really Simple Syndication) feeds.

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What are RSS Feeds?

It is data or web feeds that allow users and applications to access regular updates from websites(from which they want updates) in a readable format.

Users have to subscribe to RSS Feeds for regular updates.

RSS Feeds are available in XML-formatted plain text.

Here is a sample XML format of the RSS feed.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
 <title>RSS Feed's Title</title>
 <description>Description of an RSS feed</description>
 <link>http://www.rssfeedslink.com</link>
 <copyright>All rights reserved</copyright>
 <pubDate>Sat, 23 jan 2021 16:20:00 +0000</pubDate>

 <item>
  <title>First Item</title>
  <description>Description Of Item</description>
  <link>http://www.example.com/blog/post/1</link>
  <pubDate>Sat, 23 jan 2021 16:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
 </item>

</channel>
</rss>

You can find more about it here

Create RSS Feeds in Go

We will Create RSS feeds from JSON data. You can also generate RSS feeds from the database data.

We are using github.com/gorilla/feeds for generating RSS feeds.

First Create Main RSS feed data like the below,

import "github.com/gorilla/feeds"
feed := &feeds.Feed{
	    Title:       "Title of Your Feeds",
	    Link:        &feeds.Link{Href: "your feed link"},
	    Description: "Description of your feeds",
	    Author:      &feeds.Author{Name: "author name"},
	    Created:     time.Now(),
	   }

Then append items on a feed from selected database data using the following code.

var feedItems []*feeds.Item
for i := 0; i < len(feedsData); i++ {  
       item := feedsData[i]
       feedItems = append(feedItems,
              &feeds.Item{
                   Id:item.ID,
                   Title:item.Title,
                   Link:&feeds.Link{Href: "feeds item link"},
                   Description:item.Description,
                   Created:time.Now(),
                })
}
feed.Items = feedItems

Here you can append your data as per your requirements either in increasing or decreasing order.

Convert these feed items to original RSS Feeds using the RssFeed() method, and generate XML formatted feed

rssFeed := (&feeds.Rss{Feed: feed}).RssFeed()
xmlRssFeeds := rssFeed.FeedXml()

Finishing Thoughts

That’s it. We can pass these data to API as well as web applications.

You can refer to the full source code here.

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