fix MIME Types to unbreak RSS feeds served by OpenBSD’s httpd(8)
RSS is life - but mine was broken
As of today (2022-11-13) my website lives on an OpenBSD server hosted at vultr.
It’s great, delightfully simple and low-resource, robust, extendable, low-maintenance.
I've been getting back into RSS lately. Turns out, my own RSS feed was broken.
I knew it was janky, but would have had no idea how broken it was if not for the great folks on the datasette Discord, one of whom reached out to let me know my RSS link wasn’t working.
This could not stand!
I’ve been meaning to fix my RSS feed anyway, and now I had a good reason.
fixing the file itself
I ended up tearing out my previous RSS solution, rssg, which
is great but made some assumptions about my site’s layout that aren’t
true. I could have rewritten the script, but I’m lazy and a little
strapped for time, so I ended up replacing it with a hand-written RSS
file.
(The RSS spec is easy enough to write by hand, a little copy-paste
and replace to add a new article - at some point I’ll probably migrate
to hugo or similar and hand off the feed creation to a more
flexible script, but for now this works).
After I was certain the file format was fine and had the info I wanted, I thought I was good.
fixing the MIME Type
The kind soul who reached out to let me know the RSS feed was malformed reached out again to let me know he was now getting a MIME Type error.
My feedreader of choice, newsboat, is very forgiving of
what it accepts, and didn’t throw any errors when I tested it.
FreshRSS, on the other hand, is more strict, and the feed
would fail even though the file itself was fine.
I looked into it, and found out that httpd(8) only
supports a handful of MIME Types by default, so my server was sending
out application/octet-stream (a generic type) instead of
the rss+xml type, and it was confusing the feedreader.
add all the types
Thank goodness, and as usual in OpenBSD, there’s a very easy way to add all the relevant types one might need.
OpenBSD has an internal MIME declaration file you can link to from
within httpd.conf(5).
Here’s the relevant bit, just chuck this on the end of the conf file:
types {
include "/usr/share/misc/mime.types"
}
And reload httpd(8).
great success
Much thanks to my new friend on the Datasette Discord, the fantastic OpenBSD documentation, as always, and lambda.cx for writing a post almost identical to mine (except that his had nothing to do with RSS - he was fixing PDF serving, which should now be fixed on my site as well).