RSS Feed When Using Elixir Phoenix LiveView

While re-implementing my website in elixir/phoenix, I wanted to include an RSS feed for the blog posts. Luckily I found pretty much everything I needed in Daniel Wachtel’s Building an RSS Feed with Phoenix post, but since I’m making use of LiveView, I ran into one hiccup — errors about a missing root.xml layout!

LiveView changes how Phoenix handles layouts — there’s a root.html.leex layout, and then for live views, a live.html.leex sub-layout, and for regular controller views, an app.html.eex sub-layout.

Without LiveView, Daniel’s controller directive plug :put_layout, false would be enough, but with LiveView, Phoenix is still looking for the root layout template, which for my index.html would be root.xml … what to do?

One option would be to create a whole separate router pipeline to skip the plug :put_root_layout, {Home73kWeb.LayoutView, :root} directive. It would work, but is a heavier approach.

But luckily, there’s a new put_root_layout/2 that we can leverage like so:

defmodule YourAppWeb.RSSController do
  use YourAppWeb, :controller
  plug :put_layout, false
  plug :put_root_layout, false

  #...
end

defmodule YourAppWeb.RSSController do
  use YourAppWeb, :controller
  plug :put_layout, false
  plug :put_root_layout, false

  #...
end

With this in place, the rss xml is served plain, just like we want.

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