Generate a Jekyll Sitemap

July 15, 2015 by Robert Birnie

I just setup my blog on google's webmasters tool and saw that they wanted a sitemap. This led to the question of "how do I make one of those!" Luckily I found David Singer's blog post on building a sitemap!. This is a direct paste of his code which I found to work exactly as required, be sure to check out his blog.

All that is required is putting the sitemap code in the root directory of your blog, and then on any pages you want to customize adding (if you don't add this the page will get the defaults:

sitemap:
  lastmod: 2014-01-23
  priority: 0.7
  changefreq: 'monthly'
  exclude: 'yes'

---
layout: null
sitemap:
  exclude: 'yes'
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  {% for post in site.posts %}
    {% unless post.published == false %}
    <url>
      <loc>{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}</loc>
      {% if post.sitemap.lastmod %}
        <lastmod>{{ post.sitemap.lastmod | date: "%Y-%m-%d" }}</lastmod>
      {% elsif post.date %}
        <lastmod>{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
      {% else %}
        <lastmod>{{ site.time | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
      {% endif %}
      {% if post.sitemap.changefreq %}
        <changefreq>{{ post.sitemap.changefreq }}</changefreq>
      {% else %}
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      {% endif %}
      {% if post.sitemap.priority %}
        <priority>{{ post.sitemap.priority }}</priority>
      {% else %}
        <priority>0.5</priority>
      {% endif %}
    </url>
    {% endunless %}
  {% endfor %}
  {% for page in site.pages %}
    {% unless page.sitemap.exclude == "yes" %}
    <url>
      <loc>{{ site.url }}{{ page.url | remove: "index.html" }}</loc>
      {% if page.sitemap.lastmod %}
        <lastmod>{{ page.sitemap.lastmod | date: "%Y-%m-%d" }}</lastmod>
      {% elsif page.date %}
        <lastmod>{{ page.date | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
      {% else %}
        <lastmod>{{ site.time | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
      {% endif %}
      {% if page.sitemap.changefreq %}
        <changefreq>{{ page.sitemap.changefreq }}</changefreq>
      {% else %}
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      {% endif %}
      {% if page.sitemap.priority %}
        <priority>{{ page.sitemap.priority }}</priority>
      {% else %}
        <priority>0.3</priority>
      {% endif %}
    </url>
    {% endunless %}
  {% endfor %}
</urlset>

Cheers David!

Uber
Robert