FEED Validator

Here’s a simple starter for hacking on the Feed Validator, either to make fixes, or simply to use it for non-public feeds.

(This is for Linux – tips for Windows or other environments are welcome!)

Get the code

The Feed Validator doesn’t make official releases, but it’s regularly updated and a current snapshot is almost always stable. Choose a local directory to store the validator in – say, ~/feedvalidator.

Download a snapshot

Nightly snapshots are available from http://feedvalidator.org/download/.

Or, use CVS

CVS is slightly more complicated to get working, but then you can keep current.

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/feedvalidator login
(No password; hit return.)
cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/feedvalidator checkout feedvalidator

Later, to get the latest code, call cvs up from inside the feedvalidator directory.

Run it from the command line

There's a command-line interface:

python ./src/demo.py <feed url>

(Or, hack that script to work how you want.)

Set it up for your web server

First install a web server, Python and additional character encoding support. Under Debian:

apt-get install apache2-mpm-worker python2.3 python2.3-iconvcodec

For simplicity, it’s easiest to run the validator out of a regular user account. That means you don't need to be root.

FVDIR=<location of the feedvalidator directory>
cd ~/public_html
ln -s "$FVDIR/css" fv-css
ln -s "$FVDIR/docs" fv-docs
mkdir -p cgi-bin/fv
cp "$FVDIR/check.cgi" "$FVDIR/config.py" cgi-bin/fv/

Now, tweak config.py to point to the other directories:

WEBDIR = HOMEDIR + r'/public_html/feedvalidator'
WEBDIR = '/home/<your usercode>/feedvalidator'

DOCSURL='docs'
CSSURL='css'
DOCSURL='../../fv-docs'
CSSURL='../../fv-css'

Great!

Now open a browser to http://localhost/~<your usercode>/cgi-bin/fv/check.cgi and we’re, hopefully, done.

Running tests

I don’t think it’s any disrespect to say that that test cases are the Validator’s most valuable asset – currently over fourteen hundred separate cases of valid, and invalid, feeds, along with the precise errors. When you find a bug, or any other misfeature, a simple test case is the best way to get your point across.

To check the existing cases, run python src/validtest.py. This will check everything below the ‘testcases’ directory (you can also specify a single test by filename).

Let us know on the feedvalidator-users discussion list!