pandoc-rss

pandoc-rss is a command-line utility for generating partial or complete RSS feeds from the content and metadata of markup files. Any markup format which can be read by Pandoc will do.

It is implemented as a shell script using only the shell command language sh(1) and other utilities specified by POSIX with the sole exception that GNU date(1) is used to transform date metadata to conform with RSS Best Practices section 3.2. Any other non-POSIX code would be considered a bug. If you're certain your markup files conform to the standard date format then you can easily patch the script and drop this dependency.

There is no official affiliation between pandoc-rss and Pandoc.

Installation

Arch Linux

pandoc-rss is available from the AUR.

Manual

System-wide installation as root:

make install

Install for your user only:

make PREFIX=~/.local install

Usage

Partial feed of item fragments:

pandoc‑rss [‑hop] [‑f format|auto|omit] [‑l link] input‑file...

Complete valid XML feed:

pandoc‑rss ‑s [‑hop] [‑f format|auto|omit] [‑l link] [‑t title] [‑d description] [‑n language] [‑w "webmaster@example.net (Real Name)" ] [‑c copyright] input‑file... > feed.xml

where each input-file corresponds to a feed item. Items in the resulting XML appear in the order they were given on the command-line.

See pandoc-rss(1) for more detailed information—you can run man share/man/man1/pandoc-rss.1 to read this without installing it.

Example

For example I could render two blog articles foo.md and bar.md along with the corresponding rss.xml feed using something like the following:

$ pandoc --template=page -o foo.html foo.md
$ pandoc --template=page -o bar.html bar.md
$ pandoc-rss foo.md bar.md > rss.xml \
    -t cosine.blue \
    -d 'Blog by Gregory Chamberlain' \
    -l https://cosine.blue \
    -c 'GPLv3+ or CC BY-SA 4.0' \
    -w 'greg@cosine.blue (Gregory Chamberlain)' \
    -n en-GB

Bugs and notes

• RSS enclosures are not supported. Nobody uses them anyway.
• Any relative links in the body of an input-file will become relative links in the feed and therefore render the feed invalid.

To-do

• Add options for specifying channel title, link and description

• Add Makefile rule to install the man page

• Cite pandoc-rss as the generator element

• Produce a standalone feed if and only if at least the channel title, description and link are provided.

• Add option to specify the channel language

• Infer the guid/permalink format based on the channel link; for example if the channel link is http://example.net then the format is http://example.net/%s.html.

• Finish writing the man page

• With input-file "-" read file names line-by-line from stdin

• With no input-file, print the usage message

• Instead of using a CDATA block, encode special characters in the body text as HTML entities.

  I think this is not possible using the current template because Pandoc simply replaces $body$ with the rendered HTML; I’m not sure how we could intercept that process to escape all [&<>] characters as required.

• Print warnings about relative links in the description element (this is non-trivial). Or better, use the channel link as a base for relative links. Perhaps only do this with an explicit option, otherwise this could lead to confusion and spurious links.

• Support for input files in a directory tree.