RSS / Atom Feed Parser

Fetch an RSS or Atom feed URL and return a normalized JSON representation of the channel and items from Cloudflare's edge.

Features

• Supports RSS 2.0 and Atom
• Normalizes title, link, id, published date, summary, and author
• Caps results at 50 items
• Stateless; no bindings required

API Reference

GET /parse

Fetches the feed URL and returns a normalized channel + items payload.

Example Request

curl "https://your-worker.workers.dev/parse?url=https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/"

Success Response

url string

Final feed URL after redirects

format string

"rss", "atom", or "unknown"

title string

Feed/channel title when present

description string

Feed description or Atom subtitle when present

link string

Feed homepage / self link when present

itemCount number

Number of items returned (max 50)

items array

Normalized items with title, optional link, id, published, summary, author

{
  "url": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/",
  "format": "rss",
  "title": "The Cloudflare Blog",
  "description": "Cloudflare Blog",
  "link": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/",
  "itemCount": 2,
  "items": [
    {
      "title": "Example post",
      "link": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/example/",
      "id": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/example/",
      "published": "Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT",
      "summary": "Post summary…"
    }
  ]
}

Error Response

{
  "error": "URL did not return a recognizable RSS or Atom feed",
  "code": "NOT_FEED"
}

Error Codes

• 400 - Missing or invalid url (INVALID_URL)
• 400 - Response was not a recognizable feed (NOT_FEED)
• 502 - Fetch failed (FETCH_ERROR)

Use Cases

• Power newsletter or digest pipelines
• Normalize third-party feeds for dashboards
• Convert blog/changelog feeds into structured JSON APIs
• Poll product update feeds from Workers cron jobs

Limitations

• Heuristic XML parsing (not a full XML DOM)
• Does not follow pagination or feed hubs
• Large feeds are truncated to 50 items
• Does not execute JavaScript-generated feeds

Deployment

curl "https://your-worker.workers.dev/parse?url=https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/"

Local Development

cd apps/experiments/rss-atom-feed-parser
npm install
npm run dev

Test locally:

curl "http://localhost:8787/parse?url=https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/"

Cloudflare Features Used

• Workers - Edge compute runtime
• Fetch API - Feed retrieval from the edge

Next Steps