Podcast RSS Feeds

RSS feeds let you bring downloaded content into a podcast app or RSS reader. Because your Pinchfork instance needs to be accessible from the internet for this to work, some setup is required.

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Prerequisites

Your Pinchfork instance must be accessible outside your local network via an unchanging domain (reverse proxy recommended — NGINX Proxy Manager works well). Serving over HTTPS is strongly recommended.

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Authentication

Add HTTP basic auth so your externally-accessible instance is protected:

environment:
  - BASIC_AUTH_USERNAME=admin
  - BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD=changeme
  - EXPOSE_FEED_ENDPOINTS=yes

EXPOSE_FEED_ENDPOINTS excludes the RSS XML, feed assets, and media streaming routes from authentication so your podcast app can access them without credentials. All other routes remain protected.

See Username and Password for more on basic auth.

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Using an existing auth solution

If you manage authentication at the reverse proxy level, you need to exclude the feed endpoints from auth. Find these routes in the router by searching for pipe_through :feeds.

Example NGINX location block:

location ~* (^/sources/[^/]+/feed(_image)?|^/media/[^/]+/(stream|episode_image))(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+)?$ {
    proxy_pass $forward_scheme://$server:$port;
}

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Security

Feed URLs use UUIDs rather than sequential numeric IDs, making them effectively unguessable from the outside. Anyone who knows a feed URL can access it, but the URL cannot be enumerated.

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Adding your feed to a podcast app

1. Visit Pinchfork from your custom domain or VPN (not your local IP — the feed URL must match what your podcast app will use).
2. Create a source and download some content.
3. When viewing the source, click Actions → Copy RSS Feed.
4. Enter that URL in your podcast app.