Is there an easy way to create a sitemaps file for Rails projects? Especially for dynamic sites (such as Stack Overflow for example) there should be a way to dynamically create a sitemaps file. What is the way to go in Ruby and/or Rails?
What would you suggest? Is there any good gem out there?
Add this route towards the bottom of your config/routes.rb file (more specific routes should be listed above it):
map.sitemap '/sitemap.xml', :controller => 'sitemap'
Create the SitemapController (app/controllers/sitemap_controller):
class SitemapController < ApplicationController
layout nil
def index
headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/xml'
last_post = Post.last
if stale?(:etag => last_post, :last_modified => last_post.updated_at.utc)
respond_to do |format|
format.xml { @posts = Post.sitemap } # sitemap is a named scope
end
end
end
end
—As you can see, this is for a blog, so is using a Post model. This is the HAML view template (app/views/sitemap/index.xml.haml):
- base_url = "http://#{request.host_with_port}"
!!! XML
%urlset{:xmlns => "http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"}
- for post in @posts
%url
%loc #{base_url}#{post.permalink}
%lastmod=post.last_modified
%changefreq monthly
%priority 0.5
That's it! You can test it by bringing up http://localhost:3000/sitemap.xml (if using Mongrel) in a browser, or perhaps by using cURL.
Note that the controller uses the stale? method to issue a HTTP 304 Not Modified response if there are no new posts sinces the sitemap was last requested.
This article explains how a sitemap can be generated.
Basically should should create a controller which finds all pages (eg your Posts) and put in into an XML file. Next you tell Google about the location of the XML file and when your website is updated.
A simple Google rails sitemap query reveals lots of other articles explaining basically the same thing.