# RSS News & Competitor Feed Monitor (`monema/apify-rss-monitor`) Actor

Watch RSS and Atom feeds for new posts, product launches, competitor updates, and research alerts.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/monema/apify-rss-monitor.md
- **Developed by:** [Maarten Vreeburg](https://apify.com/monema) (community)
- **Categories:** Automation
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 0 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $0.50 / 1,000 new feed items

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/platform/actors/running/actors-in-store#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

Actors are web data automations that power AI and operations. They run on the Apify platform to scrape websites, process data, connect APIs, and automate workflows.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.
Actors are written with capital "A".

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.
The best way to integrate Actors is as follows.

- **AI agents and MCP clients** — the [Apify MCP server](https://docs.apify.com/integrations/mcp.md) at `https://mcp.apify.com` (remote, streamable HTTP, OAuth on first use).
- **Agentic workflows and local Actor development** — [Agent Skills](https://apify.com/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json) with the [Apify CLI](https://docs.apify.com/cli/docs.md): `npm install -g apify-cli`, then `apify login`.
- **JavaScript/TypeScript projects** — the official [JS/TS client](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md): `npm install apify-client`.
- **Python projects** — the official [Python client](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md): `pip install apify-client`.
- **Any other language** — the [REST API](https://docs.apify.com/api/v2.md).

For usage examples, see the [API](#api) section below.

For more details, see Apify documentation as [Markdown index](https://docs.apify.com/llms.txt) and [Markdown full-text](https://docs.apify.com/llms-full.txt).

# README

## RSS Feed Monitor & Alerts

Turn RSS and Atom feeds into a lightweight competitor, news, and product-intelligence feed. The Actor remembers seen entries between runs and emits structured alerts only for new items.

**Buyer outcome:** replace manual feed checking with scheduled, deduplicated data that can flow into a dataset, webhook pipeline, or internal research workflow.

### What it does

- monitors one or more RSS/Atom feeds
- tracks seen entries across runs using Apify Key-Value Store
- emits only newly discovered entries after the baseline
- supports a single `url` or a list of `urls`
- writes a summary row for easy automation

### Good use cases

- niche blog monitoring
- competitor content monitoring
- news and research alerts
- podcast or changelog tracking
- product announcement feeds

### Input example

```json
{
  "urls": [
    "https://example.com/feed.xml",
    "https://example.com/blog/rss.xml"
  ],
  "emit_initial_items": true,
  "max_items": 200
}
```

### Output

The dataset contains feed item rows plus a summary row.

### Local development

```bash
apify run
```

### Deploy

```bash
apify push
```

### Notes

Use this Actor responsibly and only on feeds you are allowed to monitor. Pricing is designed for recurring monitoring rather than a large one-time crawl.

# Actor input Schema

## `url` (type: `string`):

A single RSS or Atom feed URL.

## `urls` (type: `array`):

Optional list of RSS/Atom feed URLs to monitor.

## `state_key` (type: `string`):

Key used to persist seen entries between runs.

## `emit_initial_items` (type: `boolean`):

Export the current feed items on the first run.

## `include_summary_only` (type: `boolean`):

If enabled, suppress per-item dataset rows and only write the summary row.

## `max_items` (type: `integer`):

Maximum entries to process from each feed.

## `timeout_seconds` (type: `integer`):

HTTP timeout per feed request.

## `user_agent` (type: `string`):

Optional custom HTTP User-Agent.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "url": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
  "urls": [],
  "state_key": "rss-monitor-state",
  "emit_initial_items": true,
  "include_summary_only": false,
  "max_items": 500,
  "timeout_seconds": 30,
  "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `dataset_items` (type: `string`):

No description

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "url": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("monema/apify-rss-monitor").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = { "url": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage" }

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("monema/apify-rss-monitor").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print("💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/" + run["defaultDatasetId"])
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "url": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"
}' |
apify call monema/apify-rss-monitor --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "command": "npx",
            "args": [
                "mcp-remote",
                "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=monema/apify-rss-monitor",
                "--header",
                "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_API_TOKEN>"
            ]
        }
    }
}

```

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/Wmp5Kk1fABb9000z4/builds/l0MBRoOFDJgW8QXga/openapi.json