xast-util-sitemap

xast utility to build a sitemap.xml. Supports localization as suggested by Google.

This package focusses on a small set of widely used parts of sitemaps. It has a few good options instead of overwhelming with everything that could be done. If you do need more things, well: this utility gives you a syntax tree, which you can change.

Intended for sites with up to 50k URLs and a resulting serialized contents of up to 50MB. Wrapping this project into something that generates sitemap index files is left as an exercise to the reader.

See Google’s recommendations for whether you need a sitemap

You should place sitemaps in the root of your site and reference them in robots.txt. You might also report sitemap changes to Google.

Install

This package is ESM only: Node 12+ is needed to use it and it must be imported instead of required.

npm:

npm install xast-util-sitemap

Use

Say we have the following module, example.js

import {sitemap} from 'xast-util-sitemap'
import {toXml} from 'xast-util-to-xml'

var tree = sitemap([
  'https://example.com/alpha/',
  {url: 'https://example.com/bravo/'},
  {url: 'https://example.com/charlie/', modified: new Date(2018, 1, 2, 3)},
  {
    url: 'https://example.com/delta/',
    lang: 'en',
    alternate: {
      nl: 'https://example.com/dirk/',
      'fr-BE': 'https://example.com/désiré/'
    }
  }
])

console.log(toXml(tree))

Now, running node example.js yields (pretty printed):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/alpha/</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/bravo/</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/charlie/</loc>
    <lastmod>2018-02-02T02:00:00.000Z</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/delta/</loc>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/delta/" />
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl" href="https://example.com/dirk/" />
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://example.com/d%C3%A9sir%C3%A9/" />
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/dirk/</loc>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/delta/" />
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl" href="https://example.com/dirk/" />
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://example.com/d%C3%A9sir%C3%A9/" />
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/d%C3%A9sir%C3%A9/</loc>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/delta/" />
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl" href="https://example.com/dirk/" />
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://example.com/d%C3%A9sir%C3%A9/" />
  </url>
</urlset>

API

This package exports the following identifiers: sitemap. There is no default export.

sitemap(data)

Build a sitemap.

data

URLs to build a sitemap for. data is an Array.<url | Entry>. url is string and equivalent to an {url: url} entry.

Returns

Root — xast root.

Entry

Entries represent a single URL and describe them with metadata.

entry.url

Full URL (<loc>; string, required, example: https://example.org/)

entry.modified

Value indicating when the page last changed (<lastmod>; Date or value for new Date(x), optional).

entry.lang

BCP 47 tag indicating the language of the page (string, required w/ alternate, example: 'en-GB').

entry.alternate

Translations of the page, where each key is a BCP 47 tag and each value an entry (Object<url | Entry>, optional, example: {nl: 'https://example.nl/'}).

Alternate resources “inherit” fields (modified) from the entry they are described in. To define different fields, either use a full entry object:

[
  {
    url: 'https://example.com/delta/',
    modified: '05 October 2011 14:48 UTC',
    lang: 'en',
    alternate: {nl: {url: 'https://example.com/dirk/', modified: '20 January 2020 00:00 UTC'}}
  }
]

Or define them separately:

[
  {
    url: 'https://example.com/delta/',
    modified: '05 October 2011 14:48 UTC',
    lang: 'en',
    alternate: {nl: 'https://example.com/dirk/'}
  },
  {
    url: 'https://example.com/dirk/',
    modified: '20 January 2020 00:00 UTC',
    // `xast-util-sitemap` is smart enough to know about the next two already,
    // but they’re shown here for clarity.
    lang: 'nl',
    alternate: {en: 'https://example.com/delta/'}
  }
]

Security

XML can be a dangerous language: don’t trust user-provided data. Sitemaps also indicate “ownership” of URLs: crawlers assume that the origin of the sitemap.xml file is also an owner

Related

• xast-util-to-xml — serialize xast to XML
• xast-util-feed — build feeds (RSS, Atom)
• xastscript — create xast trees

Contribute

See contributing.md in syntax-tree/.github for ways to get started. See support.md for ways to get help.

This project has a code of conduct. By interacting with this repository, organization, or community you agree to abide by its terms.

License

MIT © Titus Wormer