# RSS Feed Reader & Monitor – RSS, Atom & JSON Feed to JSON (`pinkish_armada/rss-feed-reader`) Actor

Read any RSS, Atom, RDF or JSON Feed, or paste a website URL and the feed is auto-discovered. Clean items with title, link, date, author, summary, full text, images and podcast enclosures. Monitor mode returns only new items.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/pinkish_armada/rss-feed-reader.md
- **Developed by:** [Phuc Tiet](https://apify.com/pinkish_armada) (community)
- **Categories:** News, Automation
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $0.50 / 1,000 feed items

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## RSS Feed Reader & Monitor – RSS, Atom & JSON Feed to JSON

**Turn any RSS, Atom, RDF or JSON Feed into clean, structured JSON — or just paste a website URL and the feed is found for you.** Monitor blogs, news sites, podcasts, release notes, job boards and newsletters; get only the **new items** on every scheduled run; filter by keyword and date; export to JSON, CSV, Excel or straight into Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets or your AI agent.

- ✅ **All feed formats:** RSS 0.9x/2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), Atom 1.0 and JSON Feed 1.0/1.1, with namespaces (content:encoded, Dublin Core, Media RSS, iTunes podcast tags)
- ✅ **Feed auto-discovery:** give `https://blog.example.com` and the Actor reads `<link rel="alternate">`, page links and common paths (`/feed`, `/rss.xml`, `/atom.xml`, `/index.xml` …)
- ✅ **Monitor mode:** `onlyNewItems` remembers what it has already returned and outputs only new posts — perfect for hourly/daily schedules and alerts
- ✅ **Normalized items:** the same fields for every format — title, link, published date (ISO 8601, UTC), author, categories, summary, full text, HTML, image, podcast enclosures and duration
- ✅ **Filters:** include/exclude keywords, "published after" (date or "24 hours", "7 days"), max items per feed, dedup across feeds
- ✅ **Robust:** handles redirects, gzip, non-UTF-8 encodings (ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252), relative links, broken dates and huge feeds; failed feeds produce a clear error row instead of crashing the run
- ✅ **Cheap and fair:** pay only for items actually returned — **$0.50 per 1,000 items**, errors are free

### What can I use it for?

| Use case | How |
|---|---|
| **News & brand monitoring** | Schedule hourly with `onlyNewItems` + `includeKeywords: ["your brand", "competitor"]` and send new items to Slack/email via an Apify integration |
| **Content aggregation / newsletters** | Read 100s of blogs in one run, dedupe, and export a daily digest |
| **AI agents & RAG** | Feed `contentText` (clean full text) into your LLM, vector DB or summariser |
| **Podcast data** | Episode titles, dates, audio URLs (`enclosures`) and durations — pair with our Audio Transcriber to turn episodes into text |
| **Release notes & changelogs** | Follow GitHub releases (`/releases.atom`), product blogs and status pages |
| **SEO & research** | Track what competitors publish and how often; find a site's feeds automatically |

### How much does it cost?

This Actor uses **pay-per-event** pricing:

| Event | Price |
|---|---|
| Feed item returned | **$0.0005** ($0.50 per 1,000 items) |

- Feeds that fail (404, timeouts, not a feed) are **not charged**.
- With `onlyNewItems`, you only pay for genuinely new items — a schedule that checks 50 feeds every hour typically costs a few cents a day.
- Example: 20 blogs × 10 newest posts = 200 items = **$0.10**.
- Comparable feed readers in the Apify Store charge around $0.00115 per item or $0.002 per feed (October 2026). Apify free-plan credits cover thousands of items each month.

Set **Maximum cost per run** in the run options to cap spending; the Actor stops cleanly when the limit is reached.

### Input

| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| `urls` | Feed URLs **or** website URLs (required) |
| `maxItemsPerFeed` | Newest items per feed (default 50, 0 = all) |
| `onlyNewItems` | Monitor mode: return only items not seen in previous runs |
| `stateStoreName` | Named key-value store for monitor state (use different names for independent monitors) |
| `publishedAfter` | `2026-10-01` or `24 hours` / `7 days` |
| `includeKeywords` / `excludeKeywords` | Whole-word, case-insensitive filters over title, summary, text and categories |
| `includeContent` | Add `contentText` and `contentHtml` (default on) |
| `discoverFeeds` | Find feeds on normal web pages (default on) |
| `useAllDiscoveredFeeds` | Read every advertised feed of a site (max 10), not just the main one |
| `dedupeAcrossFeeds` | Skip items whose link already appeared in another feed |

Example:

```json
{
  "urls": ["https://blog.cloudflare.com", "https://github.blog/feed/", "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 20,
  "onlyNewItems": true,
  "includeKeywords": ["AI", "security"]
}
```

### Output

One dataset row per item:

```json
{
  "status": "ok",
  "input": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/",
  "feedUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/",
  "feedTitle": "Cloudflare Blog",
  "feedFormat": "rss",
  "siteUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/",
  "itemId": "3f1c0e9a2b7d4c51",
  "title": "Everything we launched during Birthday Week 2026",
  "url": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/birthday-week-2026-wrap-up/",
  "published": "2026-10-05T13:00:00.000Z",
  "author": "Carlos Armada",
  "categories": ["Birthday Week", "Product News"],
  "summary": "Short plain-text summary…",
  "image": "https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/…/hero.png",
  "enclosures": [],
  "durationSecs": null,
  "wordCount": 2140,
  "contentText": "Full article text when the feed includes it…",
  "contentHtml": "<p>…</p>"
}
```

Feeds that cannot be read produce a row with `status: "error"`, an `errorCode` (`HTTP_404`, `NO_FEED_FOUND`, `NOT_A_FEED`, `INVALID_XML`, `TIMEOUT`, `DNS_ERROR`, `TLS_ERROR`, `TOO_LARGE`, `INVALID_URL`) and a message. The run summary (key-value store record `OUTPUT`) lists every feed read: URL, title, format, last update, items in feed and items returned — handy as a **feed finder** for a list of websites.

Dataset views: **Items**, **Podcast / media enclosures** and **Errors**. Download as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML, or read via the Apify API.

### Monitoring new items on a schedule

1. Set `onlyNewItems: true` (and optionally keywords).
2. Create a **Schedule** in Apify Console (e.g. every hour).
3. Add an **integration** (Slack, email, webhook, Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets) on "Run succeeded" — each run's dataset contains only new items.

The first monitor run returns the items currently in each feed and remembers them; later runs return only items that appeared since. Use a different `stateStoreName` per monitor.

### Use it from code or AI agents

```bash
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/pinkish_armada~rss-feed-reader/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls":["https://github.blog/feed/"],"maxItemsPerFeed":5,"includeContent":false}'
```

The Actor is also callable as a tool from the **Apify MCP server** (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT and other MCP clients), so an agent can ask "what did these blogs publish this week?".

### FAQ

**Does it scrape websites?** No. It reads the public feeds that publishers provide specifically for machine consumption. For feed discovery it loads the page you give it once to find the advertised feed link.

**Is it legal?** Feeds are published so readers and apps can consume them. Respect each publisher's copyright: use full content for personal reading, monitoring, analysis or internal use, and link back to the original when republishing excerpts.

**Why are some items missing `contentText`?** Many feeds only include a summary. The Actor returns whatever the publisher provides; the `url` points to the full article.

**Can it read password-protected or paywalled feeds?** No — only publicly accessible feeds.

**Which dates are used?** `published` is the item's publish date (falling back to its updated date), normalized to ISO 8601 UTC. Feeds with non-standard time zones are handled.

**What if a site has no feed?** You get a `NO_FEED_FOUND` row (not charged). For sites without feeds, try our Sitemap URL Extractor to list all pages.

### Related Actors

- **Audio & Video Transcriber** — transcribe podcast episodes found by this Actor
- **Sitemap URL Extractor** — list every URL of a website from its sitemaps
- **PDF to Markdown / Office to Markdown** — convert documents for LLMs and RAG

### Support

Found a feed that doesn't parse correctly? Open an issue on the Actor's **Issues** tab with the feed URL — fixes are usually shipped within a day.

# Actor input Schema

## `urls` (type: `array`):

RSS, Atom, RDF or JSON Feed URLs, or plain website/blog URLs. For websites the feed is found automatically via <link rel="alternate">, page links and common paths (/feed, /rss.xml, /atom.xml ...).

## `maxItemsPerFeed` (type: `integer`):

Newest items to return from each feed. 0 = all items in the feed.

## `onlyNewItems` (type: `boolean`):

Remember which items were already returned (in a named key-value store) and return only items that are new since the previous run. Schedule the Actor hourly/daily to get a clean stream of new posts. The first run returns the current items.

## `stateStoreName` (type: `string`):

Name of the key-value store that keeps seen item IDs for monitor mode. Use different names for independent monitors.

## `publishedAfter` (type: `string`):

Only items published after this date (e.g. 2026-10-01) or within a relative period (e.g. "24 hours", "7 days"). Items without a date are kept.

## `includeKeywords` (type: `array`):

Keep only items whose title, summary, text or categories contain at least one of these words or phrases (case-insensitive, whole words).

## `excludeKeywords` (type: `array`):

Drop items that contain any of these words or phrases.

## `includeContent` (type: `boolean`):

Add contentText (clean plain text) and contentHtml (original HTML) when the feed provides full content. Turn off for smaller output.

## `discoverFeeds` (type: `boolean`):

If a URL is a normal web page, find its feed automatically. Turn off to treat every URL strictly as a feed.

## `useAllDiscoveredFeeds` (type: `boolean`):

When a website advertises several feeds (e.g. posts, comments, categories), read all of them (max 10) instead of only the main one.

## `dedupeAcrossFeeds` (type: `boolean`):

Skip items whose link already appeared in another feed in this run (useful for news aggregators).

## `maxConcurrency` (type: `integer`):

Feeds fetched in parallel.

## `timeoutSecs` (type: `integer`):

Timeout for each HTTP request.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "urls": [
    "https://blog.cloudflare.com",
    "https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/rss.xml",
    "https://github.blog/feed/"
  ],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 50,
  "onlyNewItems": false,
  "stateStoreName": "rss-feed-reader-state",
  "includeContent": true,
  "discoverFeeds": true,
  "useAllDiscoveredFeeds": false,
  "dedupeAcrossFeeds": true,
  "maxConcurrency": 5,
  "timeoutSecs": 30
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

Feed items with title, link, date, author, summary and image.

## `allFields` (type: `string`):

Every field including contentText, contentHtml and enclosures.

## `summary` (type: `string`):

Feeds discovered and read, items per feed, errors.

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "urls": [
        "https://blog.cloudflare.com",
        "https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/rss.xml",
        "https://github.blog/feed/"
    ]
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("pinkish_armada/rss-feed-reader").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = { "urls": [
        "https://blog.cloudflare.com",
        "https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/rss.xml",
        "https://github.blog/feed/",
    ] }

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("pinkish_armada/rss-feed-reader").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "urls": [
    "https://blog.cloudflare.com",
    "https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/rss.xml",
    "https://github.blog/feed/"
  ]
}' |
apify call pinkish_armada/rss-feed-reader --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,pinkish_armada/rss-feed-reader"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/3gmPER8p4zOtt0Lkp/builds/irG1AcLeaJ2suCBCh/openapi.json