Drupal 8 as a Static Site: Add feed.rss to web server config and views

Fix Views RSS feeds paths

My objective here is to ensure that my existing /taxonomy/term/%/feed and /planet/feed links still work correctly so I won't lose any RSS feed subscribers to my website. As I have mentioned previously, Tome will automatically create an index.html page when there is no file extension on a path. So it's best to add extensions then! Navigate to /admin/structure/views and edit Taxonomy term then click the feed display. Click on the path and edit according to my first screenshot above and save. I also have a Drupal Planet feed which acts on my frontpage but with tag filters, so I repeated those steps and added a feed.rss path to that too.

We aren't done yet though - my web server config needs to be changed too so that the RSS pages can be served up correctly.

nginx configuration

# Default server configuration
#
server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;
 
        # SSL configuration
 
        root {{ path_to_your_docroot }};
 
        server_name {{ your_server_name }};
 
        location ~ (/planet/feed|/taxonomy/term/\d+/feed) {
                index feed.rss;
        }
 
        location / {
 
                index index.html;
 
                # First attempt to serve request as file, then
                # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
 
        # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
        # concurs with nginx's one
        #
        location ~ /\.ht {
               deny all;
        }
}

Note that I have added a new location region in the configuration specifically for the feed.rss files. Here we are saying if the path is either /planet/rss or /taxonomy/feed/%/feed then ensure that feed.rss files are served and not index.html files.

Apache configuration

<VirtualHost *:80>
# change this to 443 is you are using ssl
 
  <Directory "{{ path_to_your_docroot }}/planet/feed">
	DirectoryIndex feed.rss
  </Directory>
  <Directory ~ "{{ path_to_your_docroot }}/taxonomy/term/[0-9]+/feed">
	DirectoryIndex feed.rss
  </Directory>
  ServerName {{ your_server_name }}
  DocumentRoot "{{ path_to_your_docroot }}"
  DirectoryIndex index.html
 
 
  # Comment out the block below for SSL
  #SSLEngine on
  #SSLCertificateFile "/path/to/www.example.com.cert"
  #SSLCertificateKeyFile "/path/to/www.example.com.key"
 
  <Directory "{{ path_to_your_docroot }}">
      AllowOverride All
  </Directory>
 
  # Logs
  Errorlog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/static.error.log
  CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/static.access.log combined
 
</VirtualHost>

The Apache configuration uses two new Directory directives. The second one contains a wildcard tilde and a regex to ensure that the path /taxonomy/term/%/feed is limited to numerics only. However I had another configuration problem - my Apache server was unaware of the .xml and .rss filename extensions, so wouldn't serve the content up. This was fixed by adding a filetype to the Apache configuration.
mods-available/mime.conf

AddType application/xml .xml .rss

Success!

The picture above provides the evidence the fixes worked!

blog terms

Static Site Drupal 8 Drupal