Django Blog #30: Adding a sitemap

Django has a sitemap framework that allows you to generate it dynamically. A sitemap is an XML file that tells search engines what pages are on the site, their relevance, and how often they are updated. It can be used to help search engine crawlers index all content. This framework relies on django.contrib.sites, which allows you to objectify individual sites of an entire project. This is very handy if you need to run multiple sites with a single Django project. To install the framework, you need to activate the sites and sitemap applications in the project. Edit the settings.py file of the project and add django.contrib.sites and django.contrib.sitemaps to INSTALLED_APPS. Also define a new setting with SITE_ID:

SITE_ID = 1 

# Application definition 
INSTALLED_APPS = [ 
   # .. 
   'django.contrib.sites', 
   'django.contrib.sitemaps', 
]

Now run this command to create Django site application tables in the database:

python manage.py migrate

The output should be as follows:

Applying sites.0001_initial... OK
Applying sites.0002_alter_domain_unique... OK

The sites application is now synchronized with the database. Create a new file in the blog application folder and name it sitemap.py. Open the file and add the following code:

from django.contrib.sitemaps import Sitemap  
from .models import Post  
  
  
class PostSitemap(Sitemap) 
    changefreq = 'weekly' 
    priority = 0.9 
  
   def items(self) 
       return Post.published.all() 
      
   def lastmod(self, obj) 
       return obj.updated

Let’s create our own sitemap by inheriting the Sitemap class of the sitemaps module. The attributes changefreq and priotiy indicate how often pages with posts are changed and how relevant they are to the site (the maximum value is 1). The items() method returns a QuerySet of objects to include in the database. By default, Django calls the get_absolute_url() method for each object to get the URL. Recall the method you created to get canonical URLs for posts. If you want to define a URL for each object, you can add a location method to the sitemap class. The lastmod method gets each object that the items() method returned and in turn returns the date when that object last changed. Both changefreq and priority can be methods as well as attributes. The full site map framework is described in the Django documentation at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/ref/contrib/sitemaps/. All that remains is to add the sitemap URL. Edit the main urls.py file of the project and add a link.

# mysite/urls.py
from django.urls import path, include  
from django. contrib admin  
from django.contrib.sitemaps.views import sitemap  
from blog.sitemap import PostSitemap  
  
sitemaps = { 
   'posts': PostSitemap,  
} 
  
urlpatterns = [ 
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),  
    path('blog/', include('blog.urls', namespace='blog')),  
    path('sitemap.xml', sitemap, {'sitemaps': sitemaps},  
	 name='django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap') 
]

In this code, the necessary imports have been included, and a sitemap dictionary has been defined. A URL template has also been defined that leads to sitemap.xml and uses the sitemap view. Start the development server and type in https://127.0.0.1:8000/sitemap.xml in your browser. The following XML output should appear:

<urlset>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/blog/2020/2/2/markdown-post/</loc>
    <lastmod>2020-02-02</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>
      https://example.com/blog/2019/12/14/ai-community-needs-take-responsibility-its-technology-and-its-actions/
    </loc>
    <lastmod>2019-12-28</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
  </url>
...
</urlset>

The URL for each post is created using the get_absolute_url() method. The lastmod attribute corresponds to the updated field of the post, as defined in the sitemap. And attributes changefreq and priority are taken from PostSitemap class. The domain used to create the URL is example.com. It comes from the Site object, which is stored in the database. This object is created by default when you synchronize the site structure with the database. Open https://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/sites/site/ in your browser. The following will be displayed:

This screenshot shows the view to display a list of the site structure. Here you can assign a domain or host to be used by the site structure and the applications that work with it. To generate the URL in a local environment, you need to change the domain name to localhost:8000 as shown in the previous screenshot and save:The URLs displayed in the feed will now be built using the hostname. You will need to use the domain name when deploying the site.