Agile Web Development

Generate Sitemap Rake Task

This is a Rails plugin that consists of a rake task generate a sitemap.xml The task crawls a domain (default is localhost:3000) for all it’s url’s, then builds the sitemap.xml file in public.

Since this simply crawls a domain for url’s, this could be used to generate sitemaps for any site, not just a Rails application

Requirements

Both of these are available via RubyGems Hpricot - http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/ Builder - http://rubyforge.org/projects/builder/

Installation

Any of the typical plugin installation methods will work.

        script/plugin install svn://chriscodes.homelinux.org/rails_plugins/generate_sitemap

or add a svn:externals entry to vendor/plugins

        script/plugin install -x svn://chriscodes.homelinux.org/rails_plugins/generate_sitemap

or from inside your vendor/plugins directory

        svn co svn://chriscodes.homelinux.org/rails_plugins/generate_sitemap generate_sitemap

Configuration/Usage

Open tasks/generate_sitemap.rake and set the DOMAIN constant to your domain (DOMAIN is set to localhost:3000 by default, and will use that in the sitemap urls)

You can optionally set the changefreq element, or add the other available elements in the building of the xml. (http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php) I haven’t devised a way to set this dynamically, as most pages will vary.

Run the task with the command

        rake plugin:generate_sitemap

Go to http://localhost:3000/sitemap.xml (or open public/sitemap.xml)

TODO

 - set changefreq, lastmod, priority dynamically during generation
 - allow generation of sitemap index files
 - write tests
 - allow for exclusions to be specified in an array

More Info

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

Questions, comments, patches, etc. can be sent to

        chris AT chriscodes DOT com

Owner: Chris Martin

Home: http://chriscodes.com/articles/view/54

Repository: svn://chriscodes.homelinux.org/rails_plugins/generate_sitemap

License: Rails' (MIT)

Category: Assets