Hugo’s default RSS template publishes an unlimited number of items and shows a summary rather than full content. Also, the feed URL and the content Hugo generates vary depending on the active page’s content type – post, page, section, category or tag.

For this site, I’ve published one RSS feed with the following attributes:

• full content so that readers don’t have to leave their RSS client
• most recent 15 posts in the /blog directory
• my name as the feed title
• a descriptive URL /feed.xml

To create a similar feed for your Hugo site, follow these steps:

1. Create a new file in your theme directory at /layouts/_default/rss.xml.

2. Copy the Hugo RSS template and paste it in rss.xml.

3. In my site’s config file, I declare my name in the author parameter. To use the same parameter as the feed title, in rss.xml change the feed’s <title> tag to:

   <channel>
   ...
     <title>{{ $.Site.Params.author }}</title>
   ...
   </channel>
   

4. For consistency with the feed title, simplify the channel’s <description>:

   <channel>
   ...
     <description>Recent blog posts by {{ $.Site.Params.author }}</description>
   ...
   </channel>
   

5. By default, Hugo publishes all items in the feed:

   {{ range .Data.Pages }}
   

   To show the most recent 15 items and to constrain items to those in one directory – for example, /blog – change the range to:

   {{ range first 15 (where .Data.Pages "Section" "blog") }}
   

6. To show the item’s full content in the feed, change the <item>’s <description> tag to:

   <item>
   ...
     <description>{{ .Content | html }}</description>
   ...
   </item>
   

7. Hugo renders the feed at /index.xml by default. You can specify your own URL in your config file – for example, feed:

   [outputs]
     home = [ "HTML", "RSS" ]
   
   [outputFormats]
   [outputFormats.RSS]
     mediatype = "application/rss"
     baseName = "feed"
   

Here’s a preview of the feed in the feedly RSS client: