Free tutorial · Paid Apify Actor

Turn an RSS feed into JSON in one small run.

Use Technical Dost's RSS Feed Scraper to read a public RSS or Atom feed, inspect its entries, and export structured rows. This example caps the first run at five items.

Open the Actor input View the runnable example

1. Start with one feed

Paste this input into the Actor's JSON editor. The feed is public and the five-item limit keeps the first result small.

{
  "feedUrls": ["https://news.ycombinator.com/rss"],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 5,
  "includeContent": true
}

Starting the run is billable. At the price displayed on 3 October 2026, $0.008 per output row, one successful feed produces at most one metadata row plus five item rows: $0.048. Check the Actor's current Pricing tab before running.

Prefer a preconfigured task? Browse the Actor's published examples for news, AI research blogs, and a YouTube channel feed. Their inputs and item limits differ from this guide; review the selected task and live pricing before starting a billable run.

2. Use the right rows

The dataset can contain a feed_metadata row and feed_item rows. A feed that cannot be parsed yields an error row. Filter on type === "feed_item" when your workflow needs entries only.

{
  "type": "feed_item",
  "feedUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss",
  "title": "Illustrative item",
  "link": "https://example.com/illustrative-item",
  "pubDate": "2026-10-02T00:00:00.000Z"
}

This row is illustrative, not a live claim about the current Hacker News feed. Publishers choose which fields to include. The Actor reads feed content; it does not crawl the linked articles.

A completed Actor run can still contain error rows for individual feeds. The Actor does not emit an aggregate failed-feed summary. After exporting the default dataset as JSON, use the local receipt script to count successful feeds, returned items, and failed feeds; it exits nonzero when a feed failed. You can try it on the synthetic sample output without starting a paid run.

3. Try the API

The Node.js example sends the same bounded input to Apify's Actor API and prints each item title, link, and date. It requires your Apify token in APIFY_TOKEN; keep that token out of source control.

export APIFY_TOKEN='your-token-here'
node examples/fetch-hn-rss.mjs

Prefer Postman? Import the Postman collection JSON and set APIFY_TOKEN as a secret value in your local environment. Its bearer header and five-item input match the script. Keep your token out of shared collections.

Need an API definition? The Actor-specific OpenAPI file describes the same paid endpoint with bearer authentication and illustrative rows.

Each script execution or Postman Send starts a billable Actor run. The repository also contains synthetic sample output you can inspect without running the Actor.

Before you automate

  1. Set maxItemsPerFeed explicitly. Omitted API input defaults to 50.
  2. Budget for up to 1 + maxItemsPerFeed rows per successfully parsed feed.
  3. Handle error rows and optional fields such as author or full content.
  4. For a pipeline that needs only new entries across runs, evaluate RSS Feed Monitor separately.