RSS Monitor

Track RSS and Atom feeds for new content.

Installation

npm install feedparser

Quick Start

Basic Feed Fetch

const { fetchFeed } = require('./rss-monitor');

const items = await fetchFeed('https://example.com/feed.xml'); console.log(items); // Array of feed items

Track Multiple Feeds

const { trackFeeds } = require('./rss-monitor');

const feeds = [ { url: 'https://blog1.com/rss', name: 'Blog 1' }, { url: 'https://blog2.com/atom.xml', name: 'Blog 2' } ];

const results = await trackFeeds(feeds); console.log(results);

Check for New Items

const { checkForNewItems } = require('./rss-monitor');

const lastCheck = new Date('2024-01-01T00:00:00Z'); const newItems = await checkForNewItems('https://example.com/feed.xml', lastCheck); console.log(Found ${newItems.length} new items);

Common Operations

Fetch Latest Items

const items = await fetchFeed('https://xkcd.com/atom.xml', { limit: 10 });

Get Feed Metadata

const feed = await fetchFeedMetadata('https://example.com/feed.xml'); console.log(feed.title, feed.link, feed.description);

Parse Feed with Options

const items = await fetchFeed('https://example.com/feed.xml', { limit: 20, includeContent: false, timeout: 5000 });

Compare with Previous Check

const newItems = await checkForNewItems( 'https://example.com/feed.xml', lastCheckDate, { limit: 50 } );

Output Format

Each feed item contains:

• title

• Item title

• link

• Item URL

• description

• Item summary/description

• pubDate

• Publication date (ISO string)

• author

• Author name (if available)

• content

• Full content (if available and includeContent: true)

• categories

• Tags/categories

• enclosures

• Media attachments (images, audio, video)

Examples

RSS Feed Reader

const rssMonitor = require('./rss-monitor');

async function readFeeds() { const feeds = [ 'https://xkcd.com/atom.xml', 'https://blog.github.com/feed/', 'https://news.ycombinator.com/rss' ];

for (const feedUrl of feeds) { try { const items = await rssMonitor.fetchFeed(feedUrl, { limit: 5 }); console.log(\n📰 ${feedUrl}); items.forEach(item => { console.log( • ${item.title}); console.log( ${item.link}); }); } catch (err) { console.error(Failed to fetch ${feedUrl}:, err.message); } } }

Monitor for New Content

const rssMonitor = require('./rss-monitor'); const fs = require('fs').promises;

const STATE_FILE = './last-check.json';

async function monitorFeeds() { // Load last check times let lastChecks = {}; try { lastChecks = JSON.parse(await fs.readFile(STATE_FILE, 'utf8')); } catch (e) { // No state file yet }

const feeds = [ { url: 'https://xkcd.com/atom.xml', name: 'XKCD' }, { url: 'https://blog.github.com/feed/', name: 'GitHub Blog' } ];

for (const feed of feeds) { const lastCheck = lastChecks[feed.url] ? new Date(lastChecks[feed.url]) : null; const newItems = await rssMonitor.checkForNewItems(feed.url, lastCheck);

if (newItems.length > 0) {
  console.log(`\n🆕 ${feed.name}: ${newItems.length} new items`);
  newItems.forEach(item => {
    console.log(`  • ${item.title}`);
  });
}

lastChecks[feed.url] = new Date().toISOString();

}

await fs.writeFile(STATE_FILE, JSON.stringify(lastChecks, null, 2)); }

Notes

• Supports both RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 formats

• Automatically detects feed format

• Handles redirects and common feed variations

• Default timeout: 10 seconds

• Items sorted by publication date (newest first)