Include Full Content in RSS with Hugo

RSS is a web-standard for subscribing to blogs. You, a reader, can enter this web-site’s URL into a feed reader program and it’ll fetch updates. That’s how you subscribe to a blog without social medias and “Algorithms”.

I use hugo to build pages into something browsers understand. Hugo supports RSS out-of-the-box but I never validated it. I’d checked it a few times from my phone, noticed that my posts have correct “descriptions” and it was good enough.

This time I ran a feed validator and looked closer at how posts are sent to my RSS reader (Feeder on Android). First, I fixed hanging fruits marked by the validator. Second, I started to include full content of posts into the feed. I frequently use RSS and I know that the best experience I get are from authors I can read without leaving my RSS reader. An hour ago, this xie blog didn’t include the content but it was easy to fix.

To include your blog’s content with Hugo, you need to update your layout/rss.xml.

Take a copy of the last file:

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gohugoio/hugo/refs/heads/master/tpl/tplimpl/embedded/templates/rss.xml > layouts/rss.xml

Declare a “Content Module” namespace:

 {{- printf "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\" standalone=\"yes\"?>" | safeHTML }}
-<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
+<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/">
        <channel>
                <title>{{ if eq .Title .Site.Title }}{{ .Site.Title }}{{ else }}{{ with .Title }}{{ . }} on {{ end }}{{ .Site.Title }}{{ end }}</title>
                <link>{{ .Permalink }}</link>

Add a content into each item:

                                {{- with $authorEmail }}<author>{{ . }}{{ with $authorName }} ({{ . }}){{ end }}</author>{{ end }}
                                <guid>{{ .Permalink }}</guid>
                                <description>{{ .Summary | transform.XMLEscape | safeHTML }}</description>
+                               <content:encoded>{{ .Content | transform.XMLEscape | safeHTML }}</content:encoded>
                        </item>
                {{- end }}
        </channel>

Now your posts are fully included into your RSS!

This is invalid on relative URLs (e.g. images) and maybe breaks on something else I haven’t thought of. Nevertheless, feed readers still can render the rest and it’s definitely a better UX than it used to be. And a new “good enough”!