Reading rss feed and generating static html with golang

Prerequisite

In order to follow this tutorial you will need to have golang installed on your machine

Project

1. Finding rss feed

We're gonna use this rss feed from this cool developers tshirt shop.

They have rss of their newest t-shirt releases.
You can find it here

2. Creating a new project

1.) In your $GOPATH create a new project

mkdir rss_feed

2.) navigate to directory and init mod

cd rss_feed && go mod init

3.) install rss reader dependency

go get github.com/mmcdole/gofeed

3. Reading the rss feed

Reading the rss feed is super simple with mmcdole's library

our full main:

package main

import (
    "log"

    "github.com/mmcdole/gofeed"
)

var FeedUrl = "https://www.devshirt.club/developer-shirt/rss.xml"

func main() {
    fp := gofeed.NewParser()
    fp.UserAgent = "MyCustomAgent 1.0"
    feed, _ := fp.ParseURL(FeedUrl)

    log.Printf("read the feed %#v", feed)
}

4. Creating html template

Here we are gonna use golangs built in template, what it will expect is for us to pass a slice of articles, and in return it will generate us a simple html page.

type Article struct {
    Title       string
    Description string
    ImageTitle  string
    ImageUrl    string
    Link        string
}

var siteTemplate string = `
    <html>
        <head>
            <!-- Latest compiled and minified CSS -->
            <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@3.3.7/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" integrity="sha384-BVYiiSIFeK1dGmJRAkycuHAHRg32OmUcww7on3RYdg4Va+PmSTsz/K68vbdEjh4u" crossorigin="anonymous">

            <!-- Optional theme -->
            <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@3.3.7/dist/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css" integrity="sha384-rHyoN1iRsVXV4nD0JutlnGaslCJuC7uwjduW9SVrLvRYooPp2bWYgmgJQIXwl/Sp" crossorigin="anonymous">

            <!-- Latest compiled and minified JavaScript -->
            <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@3.3.7/dist/js/bootstrap.min.js" integrity="sha384-Tc5IQib027qvyjSMfHjOMaLkfuWVxZxUPnCJA7l2mCWNIpG9mGCD8wGNIcPD7Txa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
        </head>
        <body>
            <div class="container">
                <h1> Example of dynamic rss feed parsing </h1>
                {{ range $key, $item := . }}
                    <article>
                        <h2>{{ $item.Title }}</h2>
                        <img src="{{$item.ImageUrl}}"  style="max-width: 400px;" />
                        <p>
                        {{$item.Description}}
                        <br />
                            <a href="{{$item.Link}}"/> Read more </a> 
                        </p>
                    </article>
                {{ end }}
            </div>
        </body>
    </html>
`

5. Tying it all together

We are gonna load our feed, based on that iterate and create our slice of articles and simply output to console our generated html

package main

import (
    "log"
    "os"
    "text/template"

    "github.com/mmcdole/gofeed"
)

var FeedUrl = "https://www.devshirt.club/developer-shirt/rss.xml"

type Article struct {
    Title       string
    Description string
    ImageTitle  string
    ImageUrl    string
    Link        string
}

var siteTemplate string = `
    <html>
        <head>
            <!-- Latest compiled and minified CSS -->
            <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@3.3.7/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" integrity="sha384-BVYiiSIFeK1dGmJRAkycuHAHRg32OmUcww7on3RYdg4Va+PmSTsz/K68vbdEjh4u" crossorigin="anonymous">

            <!-- Optional theme -->
            <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@3.3.7/dist/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css" integrity="sha384-rHyoN1iRsVXV4nD0JutlnGaslCJuC7uwjduW9SVrLvRYooPp2bWYgmgJQIXwl/Sp" crossorigin="anonymous">

            <!-- Latest compiled and minified JavaScript -->
            <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@3.3.7/dist/js/bootstrap.min.js" integrity="sha384-Tc5IQib027qvyjSMfHjOMaLkfuWVxZxUPnCJA7l2mCWNIpG9mGCD8wGNIcPD7Txa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
        </head>
        <body>
            <div class="container">
                <h1> Example of dynamic rss feed parsing </h1>
                {{ range $key, $item := . }}
                    <article>
                        <h2>{{ $item.Title }}</h2>
                        <img src="{{$item.ImageUrl}}"  style="max-width: 400px;" />
                        <p>
                        {{$item.Description}}
                        <br />
                            <a href="{{$item.Link}}"/> Read more </a> 
                        </p>
                    </article>
                {{ end }}
            </div>
        </body>
    </html>
`

func main() {
    fp := gofeed.NewParser()
    fp.UserAgent = "MyCustomAgent 1.0"
    feed, err := fp.ParseURL(FeedUrl)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }

    var articles []Article

    for _, item := range feed.Items {
        article := Article{
            Title:       item.Title,
            Description: item.Description,
            Link:        item.Link,
            ImageUrl:    item.Extensions["media"]["content"][0].Attrs["url"],
        }

        articles = append(articles, article)

    }

    tmpl, err := template.New("site").Parse(siteTemplate)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }

    err = tmpl.Execute(os.Stdout, articles)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
}

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