Django – Sitemap Framework

Prerequisites: Django Introduction and Installation

Search-Engines crawls and indexes the site’s URLs to show them in their search results. Search-Engines recommend the explicit submission of an XML file consisting of all the important and updated URLs of your site for faster crawling and indexing. Django comes up with a Sitemap Framework to ease out the process of generating the XML file and pinging the search engines to crawl. 

Let’s understand the sitemap creation using Geeks For Geeks as an example. Suppose 100 articles are published each day on Geeks For Geeks, and we have to create an XML file consisting of the URLs of those articles.

Follow  Django Introduction and Installation to set up a virtual environment and install Django.

Step 1: Start a project by following command

django-admin startproject geeks_site

Step 2: Change directory to geeks_site

cd geeks_site

Step 3: Create an app named blog

python manage.py startapp blog

Step 4: Add your app to the settings.py

Python3

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'blog.apps.BlogConfig',
]

Step 5: Create a Model named Article in the blog app

• Fields :
  • title: To store the titles of the Article objects
  • lastedit_date: To store the last updated dates of Article objects
• Method :
  • get_absolute_url: Returns the absolute URL pointing to an object

models.py

Python3

class Article(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    lastedit_date = models.DateTimeField()

    def get_absolute_url(self):
        return "/p/%i/" % self.id

Step 6: Register your model in blog/admin.py so that it shows up in the admin panel.

admin.py

Python3

# blog/admin.py
from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Article

admin.site.register(Article)

Step 7: Now, To migrate all your changes and start the server, run the following commands in your terminal 

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver

Create a superuser account to log in to the admin panel

python manage.py createsuperuser

Now, Visit the admin panel at http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/

Now, Let’s Install and Initialize the Django’s Sitemap Framework

Installation of sitemap

To use the Sitemap Framework, you will need to make the following changes to your settings.py :

• Sitemap Framework is not enabled by default in Django, so add the following to INSTALLED_APPS

django.contrib.sitemaps

• Sitemap Framework uses another Django’s inbuilt Sites Framework for it’s functioning. Also, add the following to INSTALLED_APPS

django.contrib.sites

Then add the following after the INSTALLED_APPS list

SITE_ID = 1

Python3

# Application definition
INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'django.contrib.sites',
      'django.contrib.sitemaps,
    'blog'
]

SITE_ID = 1

Initialization of sitemap

Step 1: Create a file named sitemap.py in your blog app

Step 2: Create a Sitemap class for your Article Model in sitemap.py

• ArticleSitemap class overwrites the following two methods of Sitemap class
  • items: returns all the article objects, whose URLs will be included in XML file
  • lastmod: returns the last modified date of an object using the lastedit_date field of Article Model in blog app

sitemap.py

Python3

from django.contrib.sitemaps import Sitemap
from .models import Article

class ArticleSitemap(Sitemap):
    def items(self):
        return Article.objects.all()

    def lastmod(self, obj):
        return obj.lastedit_date

Step 3: Add these lines to your blog/urls.py.

Python3

from django.contrib.sitemaps.views import sitemap
from blog.sitemap import ArticleSitemap
from django.urls import path


path('sitemap.xml', sitemap, {'sitemaps': {'article' : ArticleSitemap}},
     name='django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap')

Here ‘sitemap.xml‘ points to the sitemap view of the Sitemap Framework’s with ArticleSitemap class created in the previous step as required parameter in the specified format, i.e. {‘sitemaps’: {‘article’ : ArticleSitemap}

Now, again migrate all your changes and start the server

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver

Step 4: In the Article section, create some Articles. After clicking the add button you will see the below fields. 

when you will click the Sites section you will something like this

Make the following changes to Sites section of Admin Panel

Now visit at http://127.0.0.1:8000/sitemap.xml in your local machine. The final XML file consisting of all URLs will be rendered as :