Feedgenerator

This module can be used to generate web feeds in both ATOM and RSS format. It has support for extensions. Included is for example an extension to produce Podcasts.

It is licensed under the terms of both, the FreeBSD license and the LGPLv3+. Choose the one which is more convenient for you. For more details have a look at license.bsd and license.lgpl.

More details about the project:

Repository: https://github.com/lkiesow/python-feedgen
Documentation: http://lkiesow.github.io/python-feedgen/
Python Package Index: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/feedgen/

Installation

Prebuild packages

If you are running Fedora Linux, RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS or Scientific Linux you can use the RPM Copr repository:

http://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/lkiesow/python-feedgen/

Simply enable the repository and run:

$ yum install python-feedgen

or for the Python 3 package:

$ yum install python3-feedgen

Using pip

You can also use pip to install the feedgen module. Simply run:

$ pip install feedgen

Create a Feed

To create a feed simply instantiate the FeedGenerator class and insert some data:

>>> from feedgen.feed import FeedGenerator
>>> fg = FeedGenerator()
>>> fg.id('http://lernfunk.de/media/654321')
>>> fg.title('Some Testfeed')
>>> fg.author( {'name':'John Doe','email':'john@example.de'} )
>>> fg.link( href='http://example.com', rel='alternate' )
>>> fg.logo('http://ex.com/logo.jpg')
>>> fg.subtitle('This is a cool feed!')
>>> fg.link( href='http://larskiesow.de/test.atom', rel='self' )
>>> fg.language('en')

Note that for the methods which set fields that can occur more than once in a feed you can use all of the following ways to provide data:

Provide the data for that element as keyword arguments
Provide the data for that element as dictionary
Provide a list of dictionaries with the data for several elements

Example:

>>> fg.contributor( name='John Doe', email='jdoe@example.com' )
>>> fg.contributor({'name':'John Doe', 'email':'jdoe@example.com'})
>>> fg.contributor([{'name':'John Doe', 'email':'jdoe@example.com'}, ...])

Generate the Feed

After that you can generate both RSS or ATOM by calling the respective method:

>>> atomfeed = fg.atom_str(pretty=True) # Get the ATOM feed as string
>>> rssfeed  = fg.rss_str(pretty=True) # Get the RSS feed as string
>>> fg.atom_file('atom.xml') # Write the ATOM feed to a file
>>> fg.rss_file('rss.xml') # Write the RSS feed to a file

Add Feed Entries

To add entries (items) to a feed you need to create new FeedEntry objects and append them to the list of entries in the FeedGenerator. The most convenient way to go is to use the FeedGenerator itself for the instantiation of the FeedEntry object:

>>> fe = fg.add_entry()
>>> fe.id('http://lernfunk.de/media/654321/1')
>>> fe.title('The First Episode')
>>> fe.link(href="http://lernfunk.de/feed")

The FeedGenerators method add_entry(...) without argument provides will automatically generate a new FeedEntry object, append it to the feeds internal list of entries and return it, so that additional data can be added.

Extensions

The FeedGenerator supports extension to include additional data into the XML structure of the feeds. Extensions can be loaded like this:

>>> fg.load_extension('someext', atom=True, rss=True)

This will try to load the extension “someext” from the file ext/someext.py. It is required that someext.py contains a class named “SomextExtension” which is required to have at least the two methods extend_rss(...) and extend_atom(...). Although not required, it is strongly suggested to use BaseExtension from ext/base.py as superclass.

load_extension('someext', ...) will also try to load a class named “SomextEntryExtension” for every entry of the feed. This class can be located either in the same file as SomextExtension or in ext/someext_entry.py which is suggested especially for large extensions.

The parameters atom and rss control if the extension is used for ATOM and RSS feeds, respectively. The default value for both parameters is true meaning the extension is used for both kinds of feeds.

Example: Producing a Podcast

One extension already provided is the podcast extension. A podcast is an RSS feed with some additional elements for ITunes.

To produce a podcast simply load the podcast extension:

>>> from feedgen.feed import FeedGenerator
>>> fg = FeedGenerator()
>>> fg.load_extension('podcast')
...
>>> fg.podcast.itunes_category('Technology', 'Podcasting')
...
>>> fe = fg.add_entry()
>>> fe.id('http://lernfunk.de/media/654321/1/file.mp3')
>>> fe.title('The First Episode')
>>> fe.description('Enjoy our first episode.')
>>> fe.enclosure('http://lernfunk.de/media/654321/1/file.mp3', 0, 'audio/mpeg')
...
>>> fg.rss_str(pretty=True)
>>> fg.rss_file('podcast.xml')

If the FeedGenerator class is used to load an extension, it is automatically loaded for every feed entry as well. You can, however, load an extension for a specific FeedEntry only by calling load_extension(...) on that entry.

Even if extensions are loaded, they can be temporarily disabled during the feed generation by calling the generating method with the keyword argument extensions set to False.

Custom Extensions

If you want to load custom extensions which are not part of the feedgen package, you can use the method register_extension instead. You can directly pass the classes for the feed and the entry extension to this method meaning that you can define them everywhere.

Testing the Generator

You can test the module by simply executing:

$ python -m feedgen

If you want to have a look at the code for this test to have a working code example for a whole feed generation process, you can find it in the __main__.py.