Use Cases
Build a basic product feed for a marketplace
Under Feeder → Feeds → New feed, give the feed a Name and a Filename, and pick an Element Type — entries, categories, users, and assets are always available; products, variants, orders, and customers appear once the store/commerce plugin providing those element types is installed (see Settings → Registered Export Sources to confirm what's available). Save, then use Generate feed to produce a file on demand and check the output before scheduling anything.
Write a custom output template with the Output Builder
On the feed's Output Builder tab, reference source fields with
{fieldHandle} placeholders in the Header, Content, and Footer
patterns — Header/Footer render once, Content renders once per exported
element. Leave all three empty to fall back to the default field-per-column
export for the feed's output format.
Transform values with modifiers
Chain modifiers onto a placeholder with |, for example
{title|trim|slugify}. See Usage → Fields, template mode and modifiers
for the full modifier list.
Reuse a filter across multiple feeds with a rule
Build a rule targeting an element type once, then attach it to every feed that exports that type instead of recreating the same condition on each feed.
Schedule a feed to regenerate automatically
Set a feed's execution mode to schedule and provide a cron-style
Schedule pattern. Scheduled feeds don't run themselves — something still
has to call feeder/export/run-due on an interval (system cron or an
equivalent scheduled-task runner) to evaluate due feeds and queue them. See
Console command.
Run a large export through the queue instead of inline
For a source with a large element count, use Generate feed (or
export/queue, or a scheduled run via run-due) instead of
export/run --stdout. The export is processed in chunks of
Default chunk size (Settings) elements at a time
through Craft's queue, each chunk re-queuing the job until the whole export
is written and delivered — this avoids the timeout and memory pressure of
building the entire file inline in one request. See
Developer API → Queued export job
for how the chunking and resume-on-retry mechanics work.
Recover from an interrupted or failed queued export
If a queued export fails partway through (a delivery error, a worker
restart, an exception in a custom writer), just queue the same feed again —
Generate feed, export/queue, or the next scheduled run. Feeder resumes
from the checkpoint left by the previous attempt instead of reprocessing
already-exported rows. Avoid queueing the same feed a second time while an
earlier job for it is still in progress; both runs share the same per-feed
checkpoint file.
Deliver a feed straight to a partner's server
On a feed's FTP/Remote tab, turn on delivery, set the host, protocol (FTP, FTPS, or SFTP), credentials, and remote path. Every run — manual, scheduled, or queued — uploads the generated file to that path after writing it locally; the run's history entry records the delivery target.
Review what happened on recent runs
Feeder → History (when Enable history logging is on in
Settings) lists recent runs with status, row count,
delivery target, and any error message, including the intermediate
queued/processing states a chunked queue job passes through before it
finishes. Use it to confirm a schedule or queue job actually completed
without re-running the export.
Automate exports from the command line
Drive Feeder from php craft feeder/export/* console commands instead of
the CP: list feeds, inspect a feed's fields, run a feed synchronously or
queue it, or queue everything due on its schedule. See
Developer API → Console command for the
full reference — this is the way to invoke Feeder from a deploy script or
system cron job.