Monitor a single file on GitHub/GitLab with RSS

I’ve been using RSS to monitor single files or directories on GitHub and GitLab for a long time, and it still surprises me when people don’t know this is possible. Granted, not everyone uses RSS so that part isn’t surprising, but it is quite a convenient way to keep track of files in repositories without having to manage email notifications for the entire project.

Why would you do this?

For one, I find it nice to track updates to README.md files in a repository, a CHANGELOG, or a file that tracks dependencies like package.json or Gemfile.*

Both GitHub and GitLab give you the ability to do this easily, and it works on both individual files and directories containing them.

• For GitHub adding .atom to the end of the file will give you the atom feed (example).
• For GitLab you can create a feed by adding ?format=atom to the end of the file (example).

This works for both public and private repositories, for private repositories it requires a ?feed_token=xxxxx query parameter. However, you shouldn’t expose your feed token to a third party website, so if it is necessary I would only use a local feed application.

* It is possible to do this with a site like github-file-watcher.com if you really want to do this with email notifications.