Straightforward sitemap.xml generation in Node.js applications

#coffeescript

#nodejs

#web

#workflow

It is my opinion that, provided one has enough real-life coding experience and knows his way around the ecosystem, Node.js is perfectly suitable not only for small API projects, but for building generic web projects as well.

One of the SEO-related tasks you have to deal with when building a generic web project is generating a sitemap.xml file.

[画像:sitemap.xml]

While there are certainly a number of modules out there that might help you with this task, there's an easy, straightforward and dependency-free way to do it.

Setup a route (or controller method) to respond to get /sitemap.xml with the relevant information - in this case I'm using IcedCoffeeScript for elegant asynchronous control flow - and make sure to set the response content-type to application/xml:

callback: (req, res, next) ->
 appUrl = 'http://www.example.com'
 now = moment(new Date).format 'YYYY-MM-DD'

 errors = {}
 await
 Category.find()
 .select('key')
 .where('activeOffersCount').gt(0)
 .lean().exec defer errors.categories, categories
 ...
 Product.find()
 .select('uid date')
 .sort('-createdAt')
 .lean().exec defer errors.products, products

 for own operation, err of errors
 return next err if err

 res.header 'Content-Type', 'application/xml'
 res.render 'public/sitemap', { appUrl, now, categories, products }

Then, in your view - I'm using Jade, so in this case it's sitemap.jade - you can have something like this:

!!! xml
urlset(xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9")

 //- Home page
 url
 loc= appUrl
 lastmod= now
 changefreq daily
 priority= 0.8

 ...

 //- Categories
 each category in categories
 url
 loc #{appUrl}/offers/#{category.key}
 lastmod= now
 changefreq daily
 priority= 0.7

 //- Products
 each product in products
 url
 loc #{appUrl}/#{product.uid}.html
 lastmod= product.date
 changefreq weekly
 priority= 0.5

And you're done.