RSSHub Radar: finding feeds and RSSHub routes from the address bar

The problem: feeds exist, but the page hides them

Plenty of sites still publish RSS and never advertise it. The link element is missing from the head, the icon is gone from the toolbar, and the reader's own URL guessing fails. RSSHub Radar exists to close that gap from the other direction: instead of asking the site to announce its feed, the extension inspects the page and reports what it finds, including feeds generated by RSSHub for sites that have none of their own.

The audience is narrow and specific. It is for people who already run a feed reader and want a shorter path from "this page" to "this feed in my reader". The README lists the one-click targets it supports: Tiny Tiny RSS, Miniflux, FreshRSS, Feedly, Inoreader, Feedbin, The Old Reader, Feeds.Pub and a local reader. If none of those names your setup, the extension can still show you the feed URL, but the convenience it advertises does not apply to you.

It is also a spin-off of RSSHub rather than a standalone product, and that shapes everything about it. The routing rules that make a feedless site subscribable come from the RSSHub project, and the extension is a client for them.

How the extension decides what to show you

Two mechanisms run side by side. The first is ordinary feed discovery: the extension reads the current page for RSS or Atom links and lists them. The second is rule matching against RSSHub routes. The dependency list in package.json includes route-recognizer, and that is the tell for how the second half works. Routes are pattern-matched against the URL of the page you are on, so a rule registered for a host and path shape produces a candidate RSSHub feed URL for that page.

The result is a popup with the feeds it found and the RSSHub routes it matched, plus buttons that hand the chosen URL to your reader. The extension does not fetch, store or render the feed contents for you in any reading interface; rss-parser appears in the dependencies, but the product surface described in the README is discovery and subscription, not reading. Treat the popup as a chooser, not a reader.

That split matters when you debug it. If a page shows nothing, the question is whether the page has a feed link at all and whether a rule exists for that host. The README points rule authors at the RSSHub documentation for new Radar rules, which is where the matching data lives rather than in this repository.

Installing RSSHub Radar and subscribing to your first feed

The normal path is a webstore install. The README links Chrome, Edge, Firefox and the Apple App Store, and says the extension is tested for compatibility with those browsers, adding that other Chromium-based browsers should also work.

If you want the current build rather than whatever the store serves, the README's manual path starts from the releases page. Download chrome-mv3-prod.zip and unzip it, then load the unpacked directory. The zip name comes from the zip script in package.json, which copies the WXT output into build/chrome-mv3-prod.zip.

# after unzipping chrome-mv3-prod.zip
# Chrome: open chrome://extensions/
# enable Developer mode, then Load unpacked extension
# select the unzipped directory containing manifest.json

Firefox uses a different entry point and loads temporarily, which means the extension disappears when the browser session ends. The README gives the steps:

# Firefox: open about:debugging
# click Load Temporary Extension
# select manifest.json from the unzipped directory

To build it yourself, the README documents the WXT development server and points at the WXT installation guide. Both package managers are listed:

pnpm i
pnpm dev

npm install
npm run dev

Either route produces a .output/chrome-mv3 directory, which you load the same way as the unzipped release. Once installed, open a site you read regularly, click the toolbar icon, and pick a feed. If your reader is among the supported targets, the README describes the step as one-click subscription; otherwise copy the feed URL the popup shows and paste it into your reader.

Where it quietly stops working

The extension is a matcher, and matchers fail silently. A site with no feed link and no RSSHub rule produces an empty popup, which looks identical to a broken install. There is no error state described in the README for "no rule for this host", so the first thing to check when nothing appears is whether the site is covered at all.

Coverage is the second limit. Rules live in the RSSHub project, not here, so a site added to RSSHub yesterday may not be matched by the extension build you have installed until a new release ships. The release history shows how sparse that cadence is: v2.2.0 on 2026-02-11, v2.1.1 on 2025-08-21, v2.1.0 on 2025-02-08. Between releases, the extension's matching data is frozen even though the upstream rules keep moving.

The third limit is the reader. RSSHub Radar does not replace one. If you have no reader, the popup gives you URLs you have nowhere to put. And if you want a feed for a site that neither publishes one nor has an RSSHub route, no amount of extension will produce it.

RSSHub Radar against a self-hosted RSSHub instance

The obvious alternative is RSSHub itself. RSSHub is a server that generates feeds for sites that do not have them, and the extension is a client that surfaces those generated routes in the browser. The difference in approach is where the work happens. With RSSHub alone, you construct the route URL yourself from the documentation and paste it into your reader, and you can point at a self-hosted instance so the requests come from your own server.

Radar inverts that: it watches the page you are on and proposes the route. The trade is control for convenience. A self-hosted RSSHub instance gives you the ability to add, patch and debug routes, and to keep the routing data current on your own schedule. Radar gives you a popup and a one-click button, and its routing data only changes when the extension is rebuilt or updated. If your problem is a site that is not covered, RSSHub is where you fix it; Radar is where you notice it is missing.

There is a middle position the README implies but does not spell out: run your own RSSHub instance and still use Radar for discovery, then subscribe against your instance's base URL. The README does not document that configuration, so verify it in the extension settings before relying on it.

Licence, build cost and what a fork inherits

The repository is AGPL-3.0, stated in the README and carried in the LICENSE file at the top level. For anyone who only installs the extension from a store, the licence is mostly a fact about the project rather than a constraint on use. For anyone who modifies the source, the AGPL's network clause is the part to read carefully with a lawyer, because serving a modified version to users over a network is the situation it was written for.

Build cost is low for a modern frontend developer. The stack is TypeScript with React 18.3.1, Tailwind, Radix UI primitives and WXT as the extension framework, with pnpm 9.12.3 pinned as the package manager. The scripts cover Chrome, Firefox and Safari builds, and there is a separate safari-convert step that shells out to xcrun, so a Safari build needs macOS and Xcode tooling. The postinstall hook runs wxt prepare, which means the first install does real work rather than just unpacking dependencies.

The upgrade cost is the interesting one. Because the extension's value depends on routing data that lives upstream, a fork inherits a maintenance obligation it cannot fully discharge on its own: you would be tracking RSSHub's rules as well as your own code. For a hobby fork that is fine. For anything you intend to keep working, budget for the rule churn, not just the dependency bumps.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt RSSHub Radar if you already run a reader that speaks one of its one-click targets (Tiny Tiny RSS, Miniflux, FreshRSS, Feedly, Inoreader, Feedbin, The Old Reader, Feeds.Pub or the local reader) and you keep hitting sites with no visible feed link. Skip it if you need a reader of its own, a headless service, or a feed for a site no rule covers, because the extension will simply show nothing on that page. Before installing, check the releases page for the current chrome-mv3-prod.zip and the v2.2.0 package.json, since manual installs and the webstore builds can drift apart between releases.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. DIYgod/RSSHub-Radar on GitHub
2. License: AGPL-3.0
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases