Generating Atom feeds from your Lektor site

After quickstarting a Lektor site, a next obvious thing to do is to add a feed to the site's blog. Fortunately, Lektor has a growing ecosystem of plugins, one of them creates atom feeds.

Installation of lektor-atom

The plugin to install is lektor-atom, and is installed via the terminal:

lektor plugin add lektor-atom@0.2
lektor build

This adds a reference to the myproject.lektorproject file with the plugin and installs the plugin into the lektor pipeline.

Configure a feed

However, notice that after building the site no feed is generated! This is because no feeds have been setup yet.

Create a configs/atom.ini containing the following lines (full documentation)

[blog]
name = My Blog feed
source_path = /blog
item_model = blog-post
url_path = /blog/feed.xml

Change the url_path to suit your preferences. Trying to build now would result in an error: E blog/feed.xml (RuntimeError: To use absolute URLs you need to configure the URL in the project config.)

To resolve the build process myproject.lektorproject must be updated with two lines within the project section to indicate the site's live URL and an absolute URL style:

[project]
name = My Project
url = https://myproject.com

[packages]
lektor-atom = 0.2

The site can then build and the resulting feed can be accesssed from https://myproject.com/blog/feed.xml.