Metal oxides with the hollow microstructure by the facile synthetic strategy are hopeful in applications for photocatalysis, supercapacitor, and gas sensor owing to their large surface areas, porosity ratio and rich active sites. In this work, indium oxide porous hollow rods (InO PHRs) are successfully prepared using metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) as the template. The morphology of InO PHRs is hexagonal hollow micro-rods with a porous structure. The investigation on the gas-sensing performance reveals that the InO PHRs sensor displays outstanding sensitivity and selectivity toward 10 ppm chlorine gas (Cl) at low operational temperature (160 °C). Furthermore, the InO PHRs sensor displays a low detection limit (3.2 ppb) and short response and recovery time (38/13 s). The unique morphology and abundant oxygen vacancies are conduced to the excellent gas-sensing activities, which is benefited from the utilization and decomposition of In-MOFs precursor. In addition, the gas sensing mechanism of reducing gases and oxidizing gases is deduced in detail for the InO PHRs sensor.