Thank you and thoughts

[candidexmedia]

Thank you so much for creating this amazing tool! I've been looking for something like this for the last few years since using Listmonk, and I'm glad that it's something I can use straight out of GitHub, without having to host anything.

I forked the repo and tested the automation with my Listmonk instance hosted on Railway + a test RSS feed generated by the Publii CMS, but ran into some issues:

Background

When I tried to run the Action, I ran into the following error at the "Run RSS Campaign" step:

...
 KeyError: 'published_parsed'
...
    raise AttributeError("object has no attribute '%s'" % key)
AttributeError: object has no attribute 'published_parsed'

Attempting a Fix

I'm not a Python expert, so after querying Claude AI, it explained that "The error occurs because some RSS feed entries don't have a published_parsed attribute. The code assumes all entries have this field, but the feed has entries without publication dates."

Indeed, the feed I'm using has an updated attribute rather than published:

Claude suggested the following fix, which I used in my forked repo:

Option 1: Check for the attribute before using it
Find line 85 in listmonk_rss.py and replace it with code that falls back to other date fields or skips entries without dates:

# Around line 85, replace:
if datetime(*entry.published_parsed[:6]) > last_update:

# With:
# Try multiple date fields in order of preference
entry_date = None
if hasattr(entry, 'published_parsed') and entry.published_parsed:
    entry_date = datetime(*entry.published_parsed[:6])
elif hasattr(entry, 'updated_parsed') and entry.updated_parsed:
    entry_date = datetime(*entry.updated_parsed[:6])

# Skip entries without dates or include all if no date found
if entry_date is None or entry_date > last_update:

So I gave that a try, and it worked to generate the draft (yay!):

New errors

But a few things also happened:

1. I still got an error at the "Run RSS" step:

File "/home/runner/work/listmonk-rss/listmonk-rss/.venv/lib/python3.14/site-packages/httpx/_models.py", line 829, in raise_for_status
    raise HTTPStatusError(message, request=request, response=self)
httpx.HTTPStatusError: Client error '404 Not Found' for url 'https://api.github.com/repos/candidexmedia/listmonk-rss%20/actions/variables/LAST_UPDATE'

2. The LAST_UPDATE date wouldn't update, meaning, that the Action keeps generating the same draft when it runs:

I set the variable to 2025-02-07T16:55:54.079370 before the first run because I wasn't sure what to put, and it's stayed the same. Should it be assigned a different value?

Conclusion/tldr

Basically, my questions are:

1. Is it possible to run this with an RSS feed with entries that contain updated attributes rather than published?
2. What value should be used as the initial LAST_UPDATE?

[ping13]

Thank you for your kind words!

1. Parsing RSS is a challenge and I am sure there are lots of things to improve. Thank you for flagging your problem, I will look into it, but it could take a couple of days or weeks.

2. The content of LAST_UPDATE seems fine to me, my value currently shows 2025-09-04T08:09:18.359209. What I wonder is why there is a %20 in the URL of the error message (`httpx.HTTPStatusError: Client error '404 Not Found' for url 'https://api.github.com/repos/candidexmedia/listmonk-rss%20/actions/variables/LAST_UPDATE'). Because of this error, it seems the variable just doesn't get updated.

[candidexmedia]

Thank you for the speedy reply!

I will look into it, but it could take a couple of days or weeks.

Makes sense!

What I wonder is why there is a %20 in the URL of the error message

That's very odd indeed...

[candidexmedia]

Okay, I think I solved the %20 issue: it was because I had a trailing space in the GH_REPOSITORY variable's value... 🤦

The Action (with Claude modifications) is now working perfectly with my feed, and updates the LAST_UPDATE value.

I'll keep this Issue open because I know an AI solution isn't ideal, and there are still some loose threads re: RSS parsing...