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Sitemap generator for ApostropheCMS

The Apostrophe Sitemap module generates XML sitemaps for websites powered by ApostropheCMS. The sitemap includes all of the pages on your site that are visible to the public, including "piece" content, such as events and blog posts.

A frequently updated and accurate XML sitemap allows search engines to index your content more quickly and spot new pages. The Sitemap module will maintain a cached sitemap to load quickly, but then automatically refresh after one hour (by default). This also prevents the sitemap from getting out-of-date, which would be very bad for SEO.

Roadmap

Feature Status
Sitemap generation for single-locale websites ✅ Implemented
Module configuration to exclude certain doc types ✅ Implemented
Tasks to manually generate sitemap ✅ Implemented
Text-style sitemap generation (for content strategy work) 🚧 Planned
Support for multiple locales (localization) ✅ Implemented
Output customization function 🚧 Planned

Installation

npm install @apostrophecms/sitemap

Use

Initialization

Configure @apostrophecms/sitemap in app.js as a project module.

// app.js
require('apostrophe')({
  shortName: 'my-project',
  baseUrl: 'https://example.com',
  modules: {
    '@apostrophecms/sitemap': {}
  }
});

Start the site (with node app or your preferred command) and visit http://localhost:3000/sitemap.xml (in local development). You should now see any pages displayed in a sitemap as well as any pieces that have an associated piece page.

Setting the baseUrl

It is important to configure a baseUrl for the project to properly display URLs. That can be done in the application configuration object as shown above. To support different domains in production and development environments, it can also be configured in a data/local.js file which should be ignored by version control. data/local.js will take precedence over app.js, so both can be used to support multiple environments as well.

// data/local.js
module.exports = {
  baseUrl: 'http://localhost:3000'
};

Options

All sitemap module options are configured in an options object.

// modules/@apostrophecms/sitemap/index.js
module.exports = {
  // 👇 Module options
  options: {
    cacheLifetime: 1800,
    excludeTypes: [ 'exclusive-page', 'category' ]
    piecesPerBatch: 500
  }
};

These can be added in the app.js configuration object for the module, but it is better practice to use a dedicated file for module configuration.

cacheLifetime

By default sitemaps are cached for one hour. You can change this by specifying the cacheLifetime option to this module, in seconds. It must be a number greater than zero.

Tip: To make entering the cache lifetime easier it can help to write it as a math expression, multiplying the desired number of minutes by sixty:

cacheLifetime: 30 * 60 // or 1800 seconds

Keep in mind: Google and other search engines more than weekly, if that.Refreshing once every hour is usually more than often enough.

excludeTypes

If there are particular page types or piece content types that should not be in the sitemap, list them in an array as the excludeType option.

excludeTypes: [ 'exclusive-page', 'category' ]

piecesPerBatch

If you have thousands of URLs to index, building the sitemap may take a long time. By default, this module processes 100 pieces at a time, to avoid using too much memory. You can adjust this by setting the piecesPerBatch option to a larger number. Be aware that if you have many fields and content relationships it is possible this can use a great deal of memory.

piecesPerBatch: 500

Tasks

print

The print command will generate an up-to-date sitemap on demand and print the sitemap into the console. You can also pipe the output it as needed, to help generate a static file version. On the command line, run:

node app @apostrophecms/sitemap:print

update-cache

Use the update-cache task to force a cache update at any time. If the website is very large (multiple hundreds of URLs), running this task option with a cron job on the production server more often than the standard cache refresh can help ensure the cache is available when a search engine begins crawling the site.

node app @apostrophecms/sitemap:update-cache

clear

You can manually clear the cached sitemap at any time with the clear task. This will force a new sitemap to be generated on the next request to /sitemap.xml. On the command line, run:

node app @apostrophecms/sitemap:clear

Telling search engines about the sitemap

Create a public/robots.txt file if you do not already have one and add a sitemap line. Here is a valid example for a site that doesn't have any other robots.txt rules:

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Troubleshooting

  • If you already have a static public/sitemap.xml file, that file will be shown at the /sitemap.xml URL path instead. Remove it to let the module take over.
  • Sitemaps are cached for one hour by default, so you won't see content changes instantly. See above about the cacheLifetime option, clear task, and update-cache task for ways to refresh the sitemap more frequently.