gatsby-plugin-sitemap

What is gatsby-plugin-sitemap?

The gatsby-plugin-sitemap package is a Gatsby plugin that generates a sitemap for your Gatsby site. This helps search engines to better crawl your site and understand its structure.

What are gatsby-plugin-sitemap's main functionalities?

Basic Sitemap Generation

This feature allows you to generate a basic sitemap for your Gatsby site. The sitemap will be output to the specified path, in this case, '/sitemap.xml'.

{
  "resolve": "gatsby-plugin-sitemap",
  "options": {
    "output": "/sitemap.xml"
  }
}

Custom Query for Sitemap

This feature allows you to customize the query used to generate the sitemap. You can specify which pages to include in the sitemap by modifying the GraphQL query.

{
  "resolve": "gatsby-plugin-sitemap",
  "options": {
    "query": `{
      site {
        siteMetadata {
          siteUrl
        }
      }
      allSitePage {
        nodes {
          path
        }
      }
    }`,
    "output": "/sitemap.xml"
  }
}

Excluding Specific Pages

This feature allows you to exclude specific pages from the sitemap. You can provide an array of paths that should not be included in the generated sitemap.

{
  "resolve": "gatsby-plugin-sitemap",
  "options": {
    "exclude": [
      "/path/to/page",
      "/another/path/to/page"
    ],
    "output": "/sitemap.xml"
  }
}

Customizing Sitemap Entries

This feature allows you to customize the entries in the sitemap. You can specify additional properties like 'changefreq' and 'priority' for each URL.

{
  "resolve": "gatsby-plugin-sitemap",
  "options": {
    "serialize": ({ site, allSitePage }) =>
      allSitePage.nodes.map(node => {
        return {
          url: `${site.siteMetadata.siteUrl}${node.path}`,
          changefreq: `daily`,
          priority: 0.7,
        }
      }),
    "output": "/sitemap.xml"
  }
}

Other packages similar to gatsby-plugin-sitemap

sitemap

The 'sitemap' package is a general-purpose sitemap generator for Node.js. It provides more flexibility and can be used with any Node.js project, not just Gatsby. However, it requires more manual setup compared to gatsby-plugin-sitemap.

next-sitemap

The 'next-sitemap' package is a sitemap generator specifically designed for Next.js projects. It offers similar functionalities to gatsby-plugin-sitemap but is tailored for the Next.js framework.

react-router-sitemap

The 'react-router-sitemap' package generates sitemaps for React Router-based applications. It is useful for projects that use React Router for navigation, providing a way to create sitemaps based on the routes defined in the application.

README

gatsby-plugin-sitemap

Create a sitemap for your Gatsby site.

Please note: This plugin only generates output when run in production mode! To test your sitemap, run: gatsby build && gatsby serve.

Install

npm install gatsby-plugin-sitemap

How to Use

module.exports = {
  siteMetadata: {
    // If you didn't use the resolveSiteUrl option this needs to be set
    siteUrl: `https://www.example.com`,
  },
  plugins: [`gatsby-plugin-sitemap`]
}

Above is the minimal configuration required to have it work. By default, the generated sitemap will include all of your site's pages, except the ones you exclude. It will generate a sitemap-index.xml file at the root of your site and for every 45000 URLs a new sitemap-X.xml file. The sitemap-index.xml file will point at the generated .xml files.

You then can point your service (e.g. Google Search Console) at https://www.example.com/sitemap-index.xml.

Recommended usage

You probably do not want to use the defaults in this plugin. Here's an example of the default output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.net/blog/</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.net/</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

See the changefreq and priority fields? Those will be the same for every page, no matter how important or how often it gets updated. They will most likely be wrong. But wait, there's more, in their docs Google says:

• Google ignores <priority> and <changefreq> values, so don't bother adding them.
• Google reads the <lastmod> value, but if you misrepresent this value, Google will stop reading it.

You really want to customize this plugin config to include an accurate lastmod date. Checkout the example for an example of how to do this.

Options

The default config can be overridden.

The options are as follows:

• output (string = /) Folder path where sitemaps are stored.
• createLinkInHead (boolean = true) Whether to populate the <head> of your site with a link to the sitemap.
• entryLimit (number = 45000) Number of entries per sitemap file. A sitemap index (as sitemap-index.xml) will always be created and multiple sitemaps are created for every entryLimit increment (e.g under 45000 entries only sitemap-0.xml will be created).
• excludes (string[] = []) An array of paths to exclude from the sitemap. You can use glob matching using minimatch. While excludes is usually an array of strings it is possible to enter other data types into this array for custom filtering, but doing so will require customization of the filterPages function.
• query (GraphQL Query) The query for the data you need to generate the sitemap. It's required to get the site's URL, if you are not fetching it from site.siteMetadata.siteUrl, you will need to set a custom resolveSiteUrl function. If you override the query, you may need to pass in a custom resolvePagePath, resolvePages to keep everything working. If you fetch pages without using allSitePage.nodes query structure you will definitely need to customize the resolvePages function.
• resolveSiteUrl (function) Takes the output of the data query and lets you return the site URL. Sync or async functions allowed.
• resolvePagePath (function) Takes a page object and returns the uri of the page (no domain or protocol).
• resolvePages (function) Takes the output of the data query and expects an array of page objects to be returned. Sync or async functions allowed.
• filterPages (function) Takes the current page and a string (or other object) from the exclude array and expects a boolean to be returned. true excludes the path, false keeps it. Note that when the excludes array is undefined or empty this function will not be called.
• serialize (function) Takes the output of filterPages and lets you return a sitemap entry. Sync or async functions allowed.

The following pages are always excluded: /dev-404-page,/404 &/offline-plugin-app-shell-fallback, this cannot be changed even by customizing the filterPages function.

Example:

const siteUrl = process.env.URL || `https://fallback.net`

// In your gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: "gatsby-plugin-sitemap",
      options: {
        query: `
        {
          allSitePage {
            nodes {
              path
            }
          }
          allWpContentNode(filter: {nodeType: {in: ["Post", "Page"]}}) {
            nodes {
              ... on WpPost {
                uri
                modifiedGmt
              }
              ... on WpPage {
                uri
                modifiedGmt
              }
            }
          }
        }
      `,
        resolveSiteUrl: () => siteUrl,
        resolvePages: ({
          allSitePage: { nodes: allPages },
          allWpContentNode: { nodes: allWpNodes },
        }) => {
          const wpNodeMap = allWpNodes.reduce((acc, node) => {
            const { uri } = node
            acc[uri] = node

            return acc
          }, {})

          return allPages.map(page => {
            return { ...page, ...wpNodeMap[page.path] }
          })
        },
        serialize: ({ path, modifiedGmt }) => {
          return {
            url: path,
            lastmod: modifiedGmt,
          }
        },
      },
    },
  ],
}

API Reference

resolveSiteUrl ⇒ string

Sync or async functions allowed.

Returns: string - - site URL, this can come from the graphql query or another scope.

Param	Type	Description
data	object	Results of the GraphQL query

resolvePagePath ⇒ string

If you don't want to place the URI in path then resolvePagePath is needed.

Returns: string - - uri of the page without domain or protocol

Param	Type	Description
page	object	Array Item returned from resolvePages

resolvePages ⇒ Array

This allows custom resolution of the array of pages. This also where users could merge multiple sources into a single array if needed. Sync or async functions allowed.

Returns: object[] - - Array of objects representing each page

Param	Type	Description
data	object	results of the GraphQL query

filterPages ⇒ boolean

This allows filtering any data in any way.

This function is executed via:

allPages.filter(
  page => !excludes.some(excludedRoute => thisFunc(page, excludedRoute, tools))
)

allPages is the results of the resolvePages function.

Returns: Boolean - - true excludes the path, false keeps it.

Param	Type	Description
page	object	contains the path key { path }
excludedRoute	string	Element from excludes Array in plugin config
tools	object	contains tools for filtering { minimatch, withoutTrailingSlash, resolvePagePath }

serialize ⇒ object

This function is executed by:

allPages.map(page => thisFunc(page, tools))

allpages is the result of the filterPages function. Sync or async functions allowed.

Kind: global variable

Param	Type	Description
page	object	A single element from the results of the resolvePages function
tools	object	contains tools for serializing { resolvePagePath }