Who Goes Blogging 7: Hugo Minify RSS Code Indentation Fix

UPDATE 2021-12-15

The minify config was incorrect at time of publication, and so it’s been corrected so that minification does happen while not impacting XML files.

Thanks to Andrea for pointing this out to me!

It’s certainly been a while since the previous post in this series, which has become the home of any updates I make to my Hugo website.

This post is a quick one but it’s something I’ve been meaning to fix for a while. The RSS feeds that are generated will also include code blocks as defined through code fences (```) or through {{< highlight >}} shortcodes in your post content.

However for some reason the code blocks generated in my RSS feeds were losing their indentation. Take this code snippet example from my latest post.

resource "aws_ssm_document" "patch_with_healthcheck" {
name = "PatchWithHealthcheck"
document_type = "Automation"
document_format = "YAML"
content = templatefile(
"documents/patch_with_healthcheck_template.yml",
{
healthcheck_document_arn = aws_ssm_document.perform_healthcheck_s3.arn,
output_s3_bucket_name = aws_s3_bucket.script_bucket.id,
output_s3_key_prefix = "ssm_output/",
}
)
}

Whereas it should be rendering as:

resource "aws_ssm_document" "patch_with_healthcheck" {
  name            = "PatchWithHealthcheck"
  document_type   = "Automation"
  document_format = "YAML"

  content = templatefile(
    "documents/patch_with_healthcheck_template.yml",
    {
      healthcheck_document_arn = aws_ssm_document.perform_healthcheck_s3.arn,
      output_s3_bucket_name    = aws_s3_bucket.script_bucket.id,
      output_s3_key_prefix     = "ssm_output/",
    }
  )
}

This is happening during the GitHub Action that builds the website - I had previously been using the --minify flag which follows this configuration by default.

What’s happening is the RSS XML that Hugo generates for us is then being minified to remove the whitespace generated in that file. This includes the whitespace that’s used to indent the code in the RSS feeds. Not. Good.

On original publication I thought setting minify.tdewolff.xml.keepWhitespace = true would be enough. On closer reading, it does not have the desired effect.

The Fix

In order to fix this we need to add in the below to the site’s config. Then we can remove the --minify flag from our build script, since minification is enabled via our config now.

[minify]
  disableXML = true
  minifyOutput = true

I’m using toml for my config, so make sure you change it to what your config is defined in (yaml / json)

Hope this help you with fixing your RSS feeds too!