Nov 1, 2021

Enable Full Text RSS Feeds in Hugo

By default, Hugo summarizes each article when generating the RSS feed. Not ideal if your the type of person who prefers to read the full content directly in an RSS reader. This post will show you how to enable full text RSS feeds in Hugo.

Here’s an example of a long article summarized in Inoreader:

Here’s the same article after enabling full content RSS feeds:

Configuration Details

Create the following directory structure in the root of your Hugo site:

mkdir layouts/_default

Output Example:

jemurray@phalanges:~/Documents/www-personal/current/jasonmurray.org $ mkdir layouts/_default

Then copy the following file into the layouts/_default directory. It’s is an updated version of the default RSS template with the appropriate modifications to generate full text RSS feeds:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0xJasonMurray/jasonmurray.org/main/layouts/_default/rss.xml -O layouts/_default/rss.xml

Output Example:

jemurray@phalanges:~/Documents/www-personal/current/jasonmurray.org $ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0xJasonMurray/jasonmurray.org/main/layouts/_default/rss.xml -O layouts/_default/rss.xml
--2021-11-01 19:23:12--  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0xJasonMurray/jasonmurray.org/main/layouts/_default/rss.xml
Resolving raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)... 185.199.110.133, 185.199.108.133, 185.199.109.133, ...
Connecting to raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)|185.199.110.133|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 1959 (1.9K) [text/plain]
Saving to: ‘layouts/_default/rss.xml’

layouts/_default/rss.xml                                    100%[=========================================================================================================================================>]   1.91K  --.-KB/s    in 0s

2021-11-01 19:23:12 (8.94 MB/s) - ‘layouts/_default/rss.xml’ saved [1959/1959]

For those curious, here’s the diff between the original and the modified version of the rss.xml file:

jemurray@phalanges:~ $ diff rss.xml Documents/www-personal/current/jasonmurray.org/layouts/_default/rss.xml
35c35
<       <description>{{ .Summary | html }}</description>
---
>       <description>{{ .Content | html }}</description>