The sitemap framework¶
Django comes with a high-level sitemap-generating framework that makes creating sitemap XML files easy.
Overview¶
A sitemap is an XML file on your website that tells search-engine indexers how frequently your pages change and how “important” certain pages are in relation to other pages on your site. This information helps search engines index your site.
The Django sitemap framework automates the creation of this XML file by letting you express this information in Python code.
It works much like Django’s syndication framework. To create a sitemap, just write a
Sitemap
class and point to it in your
URLconf.
Installation¶
To install the sitemap app, follow these steps:
- Add
'django.contrib.sitemaps'
to yourINSTALLED_APPS
setting. - Make sure your
TEMPLATES
setting contains aDjangoTemplates
backend whoseAPP_DIRS
options is set toTrue
. It’s in there by default, so you’ll only need to change this if you’ve changed that setting. - Make sure you’ve installed the
sites framework
.
(Note: The sitemap application doesn’t install any database tables. The only
reason it needs to go into INSTALLED_APPS
is so that the
Loader()
template
loader can find the default templates.)
Initialization¶
-
views.
sitemap
(request, sitemaps, section=None, template_name='sitemap.xml', content_type='application/xml')¶
To activate sitemap generation on your Django site, add this line to your URLconf:
from django.contrib.sitemaps.views import sitemap
url(r'^sitemap\.xml$', sitemap, {'sitemaps': sitemaps},
name='django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap')
This tells Django to build a sitemap when a client accesses /sitemap.xml
.
The name of the sitemap file is not important, but the location is. Search
engines will only index links in your sitemap for the current URL level and
below. For instance, if sitemap.xml
lives in your root directory, it may
reference any URL in your site. However, if your sitemap lives at
/content/sitemap.xml
, it may only reference URLs that begin with
/content/
.
The sitemap view takes an extra, required argument: {'sitemaps': sitemaps}
.
sitemaps
should be a dictionary that maps a short section label (e.g.,
blog
or news
) to its Sitemap
class
(e.g., BlogSitemap
or NewsSitemap
). It may also map to an instance of
a Sitemap
class (e.g.,
BlogSitemap(some_var)
).
Sitemap
classes¶
A Sitemap
class is a simple Python
class that represents a “section” of entries in your sitemap. For example,
one Sitemap
class could represent
all the entries of your Weblog, while another could represent all of the
events in your events calendar.
In the simplest case, all these sections get lumped together into one
sitemap.xml
, but it’s also possible to use the framework to generate a
sitemap index that references individual sitemap files, one per section. (See
Creating a sitemap index below.)
Sitemap
classes must subclass
django.contrib.sitemaps.Sitemap
. They can live anywhere in your codebase.
A simple example¶
Let’s assume you have a blog system, with an Entry
model, and you want your
sitemap to include all the links to your individual blog entries. Here’s how
your sitemap class might look:
from django.contrib.sitemaps import Sitemap
from blog.models import Entry
class BlogSitemap(Sitemap):
changefreq = "never"
priority = 0.5
def items(self):
return Entry.objects.filter(is_draft=False)
def lastmod(self, obj):
return obj.pub_date
Note:
changefreq
andpriority
are class attributes corresponding to<changefreq>
and<priority>
elements, respectively. They can be made callable as functions, aslastmod
was in the example.items()
is simply a method that returns a list of objects. The objects returned will get passed to any callable methods corresponding to a sitemap property (location
,lastmod
,changefreq
, andpriority
).lastmod
should return adatetime
.- There is no
location
method in this example, but you can provide it in order to specify the URL for your object. By default,location()
callsget_absolute_url()
on each object and returns the result.
Sitemap
class reference¶
-
class
Sitemap
[source]¶ A
Sitemap
class can define the following methods/attributes:-
items
[source]¶ Required. A method that returns a list of objects. The framework doesn’t care what type of objects they are; all that matters is that these objects get passed to the
location()
,lastmod()
,changefreq()
andpriority()
methods.
-
location
[source]¶ Optional. Either a method or attribute.
If it’s a method, it should return the absolute path for a given object as returned by
items()
.If it’s an attribute, its value should be a string representing an absolute path to use for every object returned by
items()
.In both cases, “absolute path” means a URL that doesn’t include the protocol or domain. Examples:
- Good:
'/foo/bar/'
- Bad:
'example.com/foo/bar/'
- Bad:
'https://example.com/foo/bar/'
If
location
isn’t provided, the framework will call theget_absolute_url()
method on each object as returned byitems()
.To specify a protocol other than
'http'
, useprotocol
.- Good:
-
lastmod
¶ Optional. Either a method or attribute.
If it’s a method, it should take one argument – an object as returned by
items()
– and return that object’s last-modified date/time as adatetime
.If it’s an attribute, its value should be a
datetime
representing the last-modified date/time for every object returned byitems()
.If all items in a sitemap have a
lastmod
, the sitemap generated byviews.sitemap()
will have aLast-Modified
header equal to the latestlastmod
. You can activate theConditionalGetMiddleware
to make Django respond appropriately to requests with anIf-Modified-Since
header which will prevent sending the sitemap if it hasn’t changed.
-
changefreq
¶ Optional. Either a method or attribute.
If it’s a method, it should take one argument – an object as returned by
items()
– and return that object’s change frequency as a string.If it’s an attribute, its value should be a string representing the change frequency of every object returned by
items()
.Possible values for
changefreq
, whether you use a method or attribute, are:'always'
'hourly'
'daily'
'weekly'
'monthly'
'yearly'
'never'
-
priority
¶ Optional. Either a method or attribute.
If it’s a method, it should take one argument – an object as returned by
items()
– and return that object’s priority as either a string or float.If it’s an attribute, its value should be either a string or float representing the priority of every object returned by
items()
.Example values for
priority
:0.4
,1.0
. The default priority of a page is0.5
. See the sitemaps.org documentation for more.
-
protocol
¶ Optional.
This attribute defines the protocol (
'http'
or'https'
) of the URLs in the sitemap. If it isn’t set, the protocol with which the sitemap was requested is used. If the sitemap is built outside the context of a request, the default is'http'
.
-
limit
¶ Optional.
This attribute defines the maximum number of URLs included on each page of the sitemap. Its value should not exceed the default value of
50000
, which is the upper limit allowed in the Sitemaps protocol.
-
Shortcuts¶
The sitemap framework provides a convenience class for a common case:
-
class
GenericSitemap
[source]¶ The
django.contrib.sitemaps.GenericSitemap
class allows you to create a sitemap by passing it a dictionary which has to contain at least aqueryset
entry. This queryset will be used to generate the items of the sitemap. It may also have adate_field
entry that specifies a date field for objects retrieved from thequeryset
. This will be used for thelastmod
attribute in the generated sitemap. You may also passpriority
andchangefreq
keyword arguments to theGenericSitemap
constructor to specify these attributes for all URLs.
Example¶
Here’s an example of a URLconf using
GenericSitemap
:
from django.conf.urls import url
from django.contrib.sitemaps import GenericSitemap
from django.contrib.sitemaps.views import sitemap
from blog.models import Entry
info_dict = {
'queryset': Entry.objects.all(),
'date_field': 'pub_date',
}
urlpatterns = [
# some generic view using info_dict
# ...
# the sitemap
url(r'^sitemap\.xml$', sitemap,
{'sitemaps': {'blog': GenericSitemap(info_dict, priority=0.6)}},
name='django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap'),
]
Sitemap for static views¶
Often you want the search engine crawlers to index views which are neither
object detail pages nor flatpages. The solution is to explicitly list URL
names for these views in items
and call reverse()
in
the location
method of the sitemap. For example:
# sitemaps.py
from django.contrib import sitemaps
from django.urls import reverse
class StaticViewSitemap(sitemaps.Sitemap):
priority = 0.5
changefreq = 'daily'
def items(self):
return ['main', 'about', 'license']
def location(self, item):
return reverse(item)
# urls.py
from django.conf.urls import url
from django.contrib.sitemaps.views import sitemap
from .sitemaps import StaticViewSitemap
from . import views
sitemaps = {
'static': StaticViewSitemap,
}
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^$', views.main, name='main'),
url(r'^about/$', views.about, name='about'),
url(r'^license/$', views.license, name='license'),
# ...
url(r'^sitemap\.xml$', sitemap, {'sitemaps': sitemaps},
name='django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap')
]
Creating a sitemap index¶
-
views.
index
(request, sitemaps, template_name='sitemap_index.xml', content_type='application/xml', sitemap_url_name='django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap')¶
The sitemap framework also has the ability to create a sitemap index that
references individual sitemap files, one per each section defined in your
sitemaps
dictionary. The only differences in usage are:
- You use two views in your URLconf:
django.contrib.sitemaps.views.index()
anddjango.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap()
. - The
django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap()
view should take asection
keyword argument.
Here’s what the relevant URLconf lines would look like for the example above:
from django.contrib.sitemaps import views
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^sitemap\.xml$', views.index, {'sitemaps': sitemaps}),
url(r'^sitemap-(?P<section>.+)\.xml$', views.sitemap, {'sitemaps': sitemaps},
name='django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap'),
]
This will automatically generate a sitemap.xml
file that references
both sitemap-flatpages.xml
and sitemap-blog.xml
. The
Sitemap
classes and the sitemaps
dict don’t change at all.
You should create an index file if one of your sitemaps has more than 50,000 URLs. In this case, Django will automatically paginate the sitemap, and the index will reflect that.
If you’re not using the vanilla sitemap view – for example, if it’s wrapped
with a caching decorator – you must name your sitemap view and pass
sitemap_url_name
to the index view:
from django.contrib.sitemaps import views as sitemaps_views
from django.views.decorators.cache import cache_page
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^sitemap\.xml$',
cache_page(86400)(sitemaps_views.index),
{'sitemaps': sitemaps, 'sitemap_url_name': 'sitemaps'}),
url(r'^sitemap-(?P<section>.+)\.xml$',
cache_page(86400)(sitemaps_views.sitemap),
{'sitemaps': sitemaps}, name='sitemaps'),
]
Template customization¶
If you wish to use a different template for each sitemap or sitemap index
available on your site, you may specify it by passing a template_name
parameter to the sitemap
and index
views via the URLconf:
from django.contrib.sitemaps import views
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^custom-sitemap\.xml$', views.index, {
'sitemaps': sitemaps,
'template_name': 'custom_sitemap.html'
}),
url(r'^custom-sitemap-(?P<section>.+)\.xml$', views.sitemap, {
'sitemaps': sitemaps,
'template_name': 'custom_sitemap.html'
}, name='django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap'),
]
These views return TemplateResponse
instances which allow you to easily customize the response data before
rendering. For more details, see the TemplateResponse documentation.
Context variables¶
When customizing the templates for the
index()
and
sitemap()
views, you can rely on the
following context variables.
Index¶
The variable sitemaps
is a list of absolute URLs to each of the sitemaps.
Sitemap¶
The variable urlset
is a list of URLs that should appear in the
sitemap. Each URL exposes attributes as defined in the
Sitemap
class:
changefreq
item
lastmod
location
priority
The item
attribute has been added for each URL to allow more flexible
customization of the templates, such as Google news sitemaps. Assuming
Sitemap’s items()
would return a list of items with
publication_data
and a tags
field something like this would
generate a Google News compatible sitemap:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">
{% spaceless %}
{% for url in urlset %}
<url>
<loc>{{ url.location }}</loc>
{% if url.lastmod %}<lastmod>{{ url.lastmod|date:"Y-m-d" }}</lastmod>{% endif %}
{% if url.changefreq %}<changefreq>{{ url.changefreq }}</changefreq>{% endif %}
{% if url.priority %}<priority>{{ url.priority }}</priority>{% endif %}
<news:news>
{% if url.item.publication_date %}<news:publication_date>{{ url.item.publication_date|date:"Y-m-d" }}</news:publication_date>{% endif %}
{% if url.item.tags %}<news:keywords>{{ url.item.tags }}</news:keywords>{% endif %}
</news:news>
</url>
{% endfor %}
{% endspaceless %}
</urlset>
Pinging Google¶
You may want to “ping” Google when your sitemap changes, to let it know to
reindex your site. The sitemaps framework provides a function to do just
that: django.contrib.sitemaps.ping_google()
.
-
ping_google
()[source]¶ ping_google()
takes an optional argument,sitemap_url
, which should be the absolute path to your site’s sitemap (e.g.,'/sitemap.xml'
). If this argument isn’t provided,ping_google()
will attempt to figure out your sitemap by performing a reverse looking in your URLconf.ping_google()
raises the exceptiondjango.contrib.sitemaps.SitemapNotFound
if it cannot determine your sitemap URL.
Register with Google first!
The ping_google()
command only works if you have registered your
site with Google Webmaster Tools.
One useful way to call ping_google()
is from a model’s save()
method:
from django.contrib.sitemaps import ping_google
class Entry(models.Model):
# ...
def save(self, force_insert=False, force_update=False):
super(Entry, self).save(force_insert, force_update)
try:
ping_google()
except Exception:
# Bare 'except' because we could get a variety
# of HTTP-related exceptions.
pass
A more efficient solution, however, would be to call ping_google()
from a
cron script, or some other scheduled task. The function makes an HTTP request
to Google’s servers, so you may not want to introduce that network overhead
each time you call save()
.