20/11/2018 Adding RSS feed to your Laravel Blog - CodeProject

Adding RSS feed to your Laravel Blog

Adi Sk, 20 Nov 2018

You have a working Laravel app but want to add an RSS feed. In this tutorial I go though my simple solution to implement rss feed
on any Laravel application.

Hello Again,

As you might already know, I rebuilt my site with Laravel in a day. Though the website took shape within a day’s work, I still had
many essential features to include, RSS feeds, blog post comments, structured data to name a few. I wanted to explain my solution
to implementing an RSS feed. This may be a simple solution but the point is that it works like charm. So let’s get started building an
RSS feed for your site.

TLDR;
Here’s the gist of my solution.

1. Create a view file in the resources folder, this file will have the xml structure which can be populated dynamically
2. Create an Artisan command called generate:feed in the routes/console.phpfile
3. This command fetches all the posts and sends them to the RSS view. Then writes the returned xml formatted data to a file
named rss.xml in the publicfolder

I am sure you understood none of the above instructions, so let me explain this in a bit more detail.

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The RSS view

Create a file in your resources/views folder, I called it rss.blade.php. Paste in the code shown below. I’ll explain as
we go.

{!! '<'.'?'.'xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>' !!}

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/">
<channel>
<title>{{ $site['name'] }}</title>
<link>{{ $site['url'] }}</link>
<description><![CDATA[{{ $site['description'] }}]]></description>
<atom:link href="{{ $site['url'] }}" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<language>{{ $site['language'] }}</language>
<lastBuildDate>{{ $site['lastBuildDate'] }}</lastBuildDate>

@foreach($posts as $post)
<item>
<title><![CDATA[{!! $post->title !!}]]></title>
<link>{{ route('pages.post', $post->slug) }}</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">{{ route('pages.post', $post->slug) }}</guid>
<description><![CDATA[{!! $post->description !!}]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[{!! $post->content !!}]]></content:encoded>
<dc:creator xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">{{ $post->author }}</dc:creator>
<pubDate>{{ $post->created_at->format(DateTime::RSS) }}</pubDate>
</item>
@endforeach
</channel>
</rss>

As you might notice we pass two variables to this view, $site and $posts. First contains some information about the your site.
The second one contains an array of posts you want to include in this feed.

Next, we will create the Artisan command that controls the logic.

The Artisan Command

You may ask why write all the logic in a command instead of a controller. I have a few reasons why I chose this method.

1. I may want to call this command from the terminal

2. I may also call it from a controller
3. Since this command generates a file in the public folder there’s no need for requests to go through Laravel.

Below is my code in the routes/console.php file.

<?php

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;
use App\Models\Post;

Artisan::command('generate:feed', function () {
$this->info("Generating RSS Feed");

// It is important that you sort by the latest post

$posts = Post::where('published', true)->latest()->get();

$site = [
'name' => 'YOUR SITE NAME', // Simplest Web
'url' => 'YOUR SITE URL', // Link to your rss.xml. eg. https://simplestweb.in/rss.xml
'description' => 'YOUR SITE DESCRIPTION',
'language' => 'YOUR SITE LANGUAGE', // eg. en, en-IN, jp
'lastBuildDate' => $posts[0]->created_at->format(DateTime::RSS), // This generates the
latest posts date in RSS compatible format
];

// Passes posts and site data into the rss.blade.view, out comes text in rss format

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$rssFileContents = view('rss', compact('posts', 'site'));
// Saves the generated rss feed into a file called rss.xml in the public folder, this works
only
Storage::disk('local')->put('rss.xml', $rssFileContents);

$this->info("Completed");
});

This is pretty basic stuff you should be able to recognize what the code does. First, we create an Artisan command. Then we
fetch all the posts sorted by the most recent ones. Next, we create an array with our site details. Then we pass all this data to
our rss.blade.php view file, which returns the formatted xml we need. Lastly, we write this to the rss.xml file in our public
folder. That was not hard, was it?.

Updating the layout file

Add the below code to the head section of all your pages.

<!-- Change the title and href to your site -->

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Simplest Web"
href="https://simplestweb.in/rss.xml" />

The above code allows RSS readers know that there’s an rss feed in this site and points it to the url.

That’s about it
I hope you understood my solution to implementing a RSS Feed for a Laravel site. There a lot more information you can add to this
feed, you can find more resources below. If you like this tutorial, do let me know. I will write more of them. If you get stuck anywhere
in the tutorial, let me know, I’ll help you.

https://validator.w3.org/feed/
https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_rss.asp

Thank You

More about me at : simplestweb.in

License
This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

About the Author

Adi Sk
Web Developer Simplest Web
India

This member doesn't quite have enough reputation to be able to display their biography and homepage.

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