django-static-sitemaps

There are times when your site is too big to serve the sitemap.xml by your Django application. This little app is meant to help you with such cases. Instead of serving the sitemap.xml from Django, it features a management command/celery task that generates the sitemap.xml to the separate files.

Feature highlights:

NEW: Compatible with Django 2.0+
NEW: Python 3 compatible
Generate sitemap files to your STATIC/MEDIA/(own choice) directory
Split sitemap files when limit for size is reached
gzip the sitemap files when required
Set different domain for sitemap file
Ping google that sitemap has changed

Python 2 users

Python 2 users have should use 4.4.0. Newer versions will by Python 3 compatible only. Sorry about that.

Requirements

The only requirement is Django 1.8+. App should work with older Django versions with some settings tweaks.

Usage

Install via standard Python way::

pip install django-static-sitemaps

Add static_sitemaps to you INSTALLED_APPS and make sure django.contrib.sitemaps is present too:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'django.contrib.sitemaps',
    ...
    'static_sitemaps',
    ...
)

SITE_ID = 1

Remember to run python manage.py makemigrations and python manage.py migrate.

Set STATICSITEMAPS_ROOT_SITEMAP variable in your settings.py to point to dictionary holding the sitemaps configuration (as seen in Django docs)::

STATICSITEMAPS_ROOT_SITEMAP = 'myproject.sitemaps.sitemaps'

Also, make sure you have STATICSITEMAPS_ROOT_DIR or at least STATIC_ROOT configured. Sitemap files will be placed there.

Include static_sitemaps.urls to your urls.py to serve the root sitemap.xml if you want to serve index file through Django (might be usefull sometimes when it's hard for you to serve it by webserver itself):

urlpatterns = [
    path('', include('static_sitemaps.urls')),
]

Setup your cron to run::

django-admin.py refresh_sitemap

periodically. Usually, it's enough to set it to run once by 30 minutes or so.

For Windows users you can alternatively use the following command:

python manage.py runserver

Done.

Alternatively, you can run this using a Celery task runner. For details, look below.

Note: Your sitemap files will be served from STATIC_URL by default. If your STATIC_URL is a relative one (e.g. /static/), the result will be prepended the domain to respect the current Site object. If your STATIC_URL is absolute (generally doesn't start with a '/'), sitemaps URL will respect it completely. If you need more detailed control, see STATICSITEMAPS_URL setting.

Note about sitemap index lastmod: In the static_sitemaps app the sitemaps index works slightly different than the Django's default behaviour. Just like Django it also gathers all urls from the generated sitemaps but it also includes a new XML tag lastmod. The date/time set in this tag comes from the first element of the generated file, so reverse sorting your query by your date field will keep this information accurate. This is important to inform the crawler how fresh is the information inside each sitemap inside the sitemap_index.xml.

Running as celery task

If you run celery as your task runner, you should be ready to go out of the box. django-static-sitemaps includes the GenerateSitemap task which will be automatically run each STATICSITEMAPS_REFRESH_AFTER minutes (defaults to 60 ~ 1 hour). You can optionally bypass it by setting it to None.

Advanced settings

STATICSITEMAPS_ROOT_DIR Filesystem path to generate the sitemaps files to. Defaults to STATIC_ROOT directory.

STATICSITEMAPS_USE_GZIP Defaults to True. If True, gzip compression will be used when generating the sitemaps files (which is very possible by sitemaps specification).

STATICSITEMAPS_GZIP_METHOD Gzip method to use. Must be in ['python', 'system', ].

STATICSITEMAPS_SYSTEM_GZIP_PATH Path to the gzip binary if use STATICSITEMAPS_GZIP_METHOD == 'system'.

STATICSITEMAPS_FILENAME_TEMPLATE Template for sitemap parts. Defaults to sitemap-%(section)s-%(page)s.xml.

STATICSITEMAPS_INDEX_TEMPLATE Template path for sitemap index. Defaults to static_sitemaps/sitemap_index.xml.

STATICSITEMAPS_URL Set this to the URL from which you want to serve the sitemaps. Can be an URL with and without domain, e.g. http://example.com/media/sitemaps/ or /media/sitemaps/. If no domain is given, the domain of the current Django site is used. Default is STATIC_URL.

STATICSITEMAPS_LANGUAGE Language code to use when generating the sitemaps. Defaults to LANGUAGE_CODE setting.

STATICSITEMAPS_PING_GOOGLE Boolean determining whether to ping google after sitemaps have been updated. Defaults to True. Please note that google will only be notified if something changed in the sitemap file set.

STATICSITEMAPS_REFRESH_AFTER How often (in minutes) should the celery task be run. Defaults to 60 minutes.

STATICSITEMAPS_MOCK_SITE True|False setting if you want to mock the Django sites framework. Useful if you want to use package without enabling django.contrib.sites. Defaults to False.

STATICSITEMAPS_MOCK_SITE_NAME URL of the site your mocking. This is what will show up in your sitemap as the URL. For example: 'www.yoursite.com'. Defaults to None.

STATICSITEMAPS_MOCK_SITE_PROTOCOL Protocol to use when mocking above site name. Defaults to 'http'.

STATICSITEMAPS_STORAGE Storage class to use. Defaults to django.core.files.storage.FileSystemStorage.

Using a custom template

If you need to use a template different from the Django's default (for example to generate a Google News sitemap) you can extend the you Sitemap class and setting a sitemap_template attribute. For example:

from django.contrib.sitemaps import GenericSitemap

class GoogleNewsSitemap(GenericSitemap):
    sitemap_template = 'sitemap_googlenews.xml'