💡 RFC: Support for JSON feeds

[brycewray]

Background & Motivation

Just as there currently is a way to produce an RSS feed, I would like for there to be also a way to produce a JSON feed (for more information about this, see https://jsonfeed.org). In my Eleventy site I was able to adapt an RSS-generating template to do this, so am hoping it's similarly easy to do this in Astro.

Proposed Solution

Possible solutions

1. Adapt the rss object so that it can also produce JSON feeds.
2. Create a similar object (jsonfeed?) to produce JSON feeds.

Alternatives considered

N/A

Risks, downsides, and/or tradeoffs

Given that many newsreader apps support both RSS and JSON feeds and that there are certain advantages to the latter (as noted at https://www.jsonfeed.org/2017/05/17/announcing-json-feed.html), it would be unfortunate if Astro lacked this ability.

Open Questions

N/A

Note: I lack the coding ability to provide a PR, hence my answer under "Help make it happen!" Wish I could help in that regard.

Detailed Design

No response

Help make it happen!

• I am willing to submit a PR to implement this change.
• I am willing to submit a PR to implement this change, but would need some guidance.
• I am not willing to submit a PR to implement this change.

[jasikpark]

I would love to see this happen as well for the automatic rss support + potentially as another example of generating non-html files based on Astro data.

[drwpow]

There’s not really any technical limitations from this happening. In theory we could also support JSON feed, Atom 1.0, and anything else. Worst case scenario would just be a bit of boilerplate, but it’d still be much better than the alternative of doing everything yourself from scratch (and would still have the efficiency benefit of rendering all your HTML for multiple pages and some schema file from the same fetch call, which is as good as it gets).

[tony-sull]

This could be a nice help for quick Algolia support as well. I've seen a few 11ty projects that take advantage of it's data pipeline and templating to build an algolia.json file used to populate search results

[matthewp]

@brycewray #1305 is a general solution to dynamically creating files. Does that fulfill this issue, if it were to be accepted?

[brycewray]

@matthewp Probably, but I agree with the comment in that issue re seeing how other SSGs do it. I know Eleventy does it through a plugin (https://www.11ty.dev/docs/plugins/rss/) and Hugo does it through built-in Go templates (https://gohugo.io/templates/rss/).

[jasikpark]

It would definitely be nice to include the ability to import external file templates from npm - so there can be a package that allows you to create a json feed via the endpoint api or whatever we end up doing, rather than requiring you to write your own / have one holy implementation 😁

[drwpow]

IMO #1305 could be a general-purpose solution, even for RSS, and including JSON feeds. I’d want to merge this RFC into that, if possible.

[FredKSchott]

Hey everyone! Our current RFC process is beginning to break down at this size, with over 50 open RFCs currently in the "discussing" stage. A growing community is a great problem to have, but our ability to give you RFC feedback has suffered as a result. In an effort to improve our RFC process, we are making some changes to better organize things.

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