Automatic Sitemap Generation

Marmite now automatically generates a sitemap.xml file for your website. This feature is enabled by default and helps search engines discover and index your content more effectively.

What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is an XML file that lists all the URLs on your website. It helps search engines like Google, Bing, and others to:

• Discover all pages on your site
• Understand your site structure
• Know when pages were last updated
• Prioritize crawling of important pages

How It Works

When you build your site, Marmite automatically:

1. Collects all generated URLs (posts, pages, tags, authors, series, etc.)
2. Creates a standard XML sitemap following the sitemaps.org protocol
3. Saves it as sitemap.xml in your site's root directory

Configuration

The sitemap generation is enabled by default. You can disable it in your marmite.yaml:

build_sitemap: false

URL Format

The URLs in your sitemap depend on whether you have configured a base URL:

With Base URL

When you have a url configured in your marmite.yaml:

url: https://example.com

The sitemap will contain absolute URLs:

<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/getting-started.html</loc>
</url>

Without Base URL

If no base URL is configured, the sitemap will contain relative URLs:

<url>
  <loc>/getting-started.html</loc>
</url>

What's Included

The sitemap includes URLs for:

• Homepage (index.html)
• All published posts
• All pages
• Tag archive pages
• Author pages
• Series pages
• Stream pages (except draft)
• Archive pages by year
• Index pages for tags, authors, series, streams, and archives

What's Excluded

The following are NOT included in the sitemap:

• Draft posts (content in the draft stream)
• RSS/JSON feed URLs
• Static assets (CSS, JS, images)
• Source markdown files

Verifying Your Sitemap

After building your site, you can verify the sitemap:

# Build your site
marmite input_folder output_folder

# Check if sitemap was created
ls output_folder/sitemap.xml

# View the first few entries
head -20 output_folder/sitemap.xml

Submitting to Search Engines

Once your site is deployed, you can submit your sitemap to search engines:

Google Search Console

1. Go to Google Search Console
2. Select your property
3. Go to "Sitemaps" in the sidebar
4. Enter sitemap.xml and submit

Bing Webmaster Tools

1. Go to Bing Webmaster Tools
2. Select your site
3. Go to "Sitemaps" in the sidebar
4. Submit your sitemap URL

robots.txt

You can also add your sitemap to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Customizing the Sitemap

If you need to customize the sitemap format, you can override the default template by creating a templates/sitemap.xml file in your project:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
{%- for url in sitemap_urls %}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ url }}</loc>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
{%- endfor %}
</urlset>

Example Output

Here's what a typical sitemap looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/index.html</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/getting-started.html</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/about.html</loc>
  </url>
  <!-- ... more URLs ... -->
</urlset>

Integration with File Mapping

If you need more control over your sitemap, you can disable automatic generation and use the file-mapping-feature to copy a custom sitemap:

build_sitemap: false
file_mapping:
  - source: custom-sitemap.xml
    dest: sitemap.xml

The automatic sitemap generation feature makes it easy to improve your site's SEO without any extra configuration or manual work.

Please consider giving a ☆ on Marmite Github repository, that helps a lot!