Gatsby Plugin Sitemap

Create a sitemap.xml for your Gatsby site.

#Gatsby#Gatsby Plugins#SEO#Sitemap

9th July 2022

Time to read: 2 mins

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Install

npm install gatsby-plugin-sitemap

How to Use

// In your gatsby-config.js
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.

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

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, we 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 = /sitemap) 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. While this is usually an array of strings it is possible to enter other data types into this array for custom filtering. 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.
  • 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

This site uses the following configuration:

// gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
     {
      resolve: `gatsby-plugin-sitemap`,
      options: {
        query: `
          { 
            allContentfulPortfolio(sort: {order: DESC, fields: updatedAt}) {
              nodes {
                slug
                updatedAt(formatString: "YYYY-MM-DD")
              }
            }
            allContentfulBlogPost(sort: {order: DESC, fields: updatedAt}) {
              nodes {
                slug
                updatedAt(formatString: "YYYY-MM-DD")
              }
            }
            allFile(filter: {relativeDirectory: {eq: "lab"}}) {
              nodes {
                relativePath
                modifiedTime(formatString: "YYYY-MM-DD")
              }
            }
            site {
              siteMetadata {
                siteUrl
              }
            }
          }
        `,
        resolveSiteUrl: ({ site: { siteMetadata: { siteUrl } } }) => siteUrl,
        resolvePages: (
          { 
            allContentfulBlogPost: { nodes: mdxs },
            allContentfulPortfolio: { nodes: pfposts },
            allFile: { nodes: labs }
          }
         ) => {

          const posts = mdxs.map(mdx => {
            return {
              path: `/archive/${mdx.slug}/`,
              lastmod: mdx.updatedAt,
            }
          })

          const portfl = pfposts.map(pfpost => {
            return {
              path: `/portfolio/${pfpost.slug}/`,
              lastmod: pfpost.updatedAt,
            }
          })

          const labPosts = labs.map(lab => {
            return {
              path: `/${lab.relativePath.split('.js')[0]}/`,
              lastmod: lab.modifiedTime,
            }
          })

          const home = {
            path: '/',
            lastmod: posts[0].updatedAt,
          }

          const archive = {
            path: '/archive/',
            lastmod: posts[0].updatedAt,
          }

          const portfolio = {
            path: '/portfolio/',
            lastmod: pfposts[0].updatedAt,
          }

          const lab = {
            path: '/lab/',
            lastmod: labPosts[0].modifiedTime,
          }

          return [home, ...posts, ...portfl, ...labPosts, lab, archive, portfolio]
        },
        serialize: ({ path, lastmod, changefreq, priority }) => {
          return {
            url: path,
            lastmod,
            changefreq,
            priority,
          }
        },
      },
    },
  ],
}

Sample Output

<url>
  <loc>https://mitch.gatsbyjs.io/archive/prism-syntax-highlighter/</loc>
  <lastmod>2022-07-26T00:00:00.000Z</lastmod>
</url>

resolveSiteUrl

Sync or async functions allowed.

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

ParamTypeDescription
dataobjectResults of the GraphQL query

resolvePagePath

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

ParamTypeDescription
pageobjectArray Item returned from resolvePages

resolvePages

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

ParamTypeDescription
dataobjectresults of the GraphQL query

filterPages

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.

ParamTypeDescription
pageobject
excludedRoutestringElement from excludes Array in plugin config
toolsobjectcontains tools for filtering { minimatch, withoutTrailingSlash, resolvePagePath }

serialize

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

ParamTypeDescription
pageobjectA single element from the results of the resolvePages function
toolsobjectcontains tools for serializing { resolvePagePath }