How to receive Webhooks for new RSS items

The goal of this article is to learn how to subscribe to an RSS Feed via an easy-to-use REST API, so you get a Webhook sent to your server whenever there is a new item in the feed. This guide works for RSS, ATOM and JSON-Feeds.

Let's say you've got an RSS Feed of a news or social media site and want to send out a push-notification or email to your users whenever there is new content published in the feed. One of the easiest and most straightforward ways to do this is via RSS API. Here's how it'll work:

1. You tell RSS API which RSS Feeds you want to "subscribe" to and provide a Webhook URL to your system
2. From now on, RSS API will monitor those RSS Feeds - you don't need to do anything
3. RSS API will then send a Webhook (a POST-Request) to your Server whenever there is a new Item in the RSS Feed
4. You can now read the received Webhook data and use it however you like - e.g. send our push notifications or emails - or automatically create a blog post.

Okay, so let's get started!

Subscribe to a Feed

First, you need to sign up for RSS API. Don't worry - everything is 100% free for the first 7 days, while you test it and set everything up.

Now, you just need to create an "Application"to receive an API Key you can use and set a Webhook URL in the Dashboard where you want to receive all items to - That's it!
Now you can subscribe to any RSS Feed by calling this API endpoint:

https://api.rssapi.net/v1/apikey/subscribe?url=https://www.nasa.gov/rss/dyn/breaking_news.rss

Just replace the above RSS Feed URL with the link of the RSS Feed you want to "subscribe" to and receive Webhooks for. You can repeat this step with as many RSS Feeds as you like.
Make sure to replace the apikey in the example above with your own API Key. Learn more about subscribing to feeds.

RSS API is now monitoring all feeds you have subscribed to. You don't need to do anything to keep track of new items in the feeds.

Getting Webhooks for new Feed items

As soon as there is a new item in one of the feeds you've subscribed to, RSS API will send a POST-Request to the Webhook URL you specified earlier.
You server can then parse the incoming JSON-data to read the content of all new items. Here's an example of the data you'll receive.

You can now use the received data however you like. For example, you could use it to send a notification to your users, to analyze it, or to cross-post content to different platforms by combining RSS API with other APIs.

I hope this article helped you get an understanding of how you can subscribe to RSS, ATOM or JSON Feeds to receive Webhooks for all new content. If you have any questions or specific requirements, please contact us!