How to create a Django Sitemap

Sitemap is a file with an xml extension that contains the pages of the content we have published on our site. Today, the site map has become one of the most important SEO criteria to be found on every site.

We want to start by creating a new project.

$ django-admin startproject django_sitemap
$ cd django_sitemap/

We now want to create a new app and I will call it my app.

$ ./manage.py startapp myapp

We can add myapp to our install apps.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'myapp',
]

django_sitemap/urls.py:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include
urlpatterns = [
    path('', include('myapp.urls')),
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
]

myapp/urls.py:

from django.urls import path
from myapp.views import about
urlpatterns = [
    path('about/', about, name='about')
]

myapp/views.py:

from django.http import HttpResponse
def about(request):
    return HttpResponse('about page')

There’s a package called Django contrib sitemaps and start creating our sitemap.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'myapp',
    'django.contrib.sitemaps',
]

StaticViewSitemap() will be a site map for all of our static views. Every single site map has to have a function called an item and location() should return a path for every single item.

myapp/sitemaps.py:

from django.contrib.sitemaps import Sitemap
from django.shortcuts import reverse
class StaticViewSitemap(Sitemap):
    def items(self):
        return ['about']
    def location(self, item):
        return reverse(item)

We want to import static view the site map and then we can create a new dict called site maps and we want to give it the key of static and the value of static view side map because we'll need to pass this dict in a moment.

django_sitemap/urls.py:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.contrib.sitemaps.views import sitemap
from django.urls import include, path
from myapp.sitemaps import StaticViewSitemap
sitemaps = {
    'static': StaticViewSitemap
}
urlpatterns = [
    path('', include('myapp.urls')),
    path('sitemap.xml', sitemap, {'sitemaps': sitemaps}),
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
]

Running the application

• http://127.0.0.1:8000/sitemap.xml, we get an XML file which contains a location.

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <url>
        <loc>http://127.0.0.1:8000/about/</loc>
    </url>
</urlset>

Model

We create a snippet model.

from django.db import models
from django.utils.text import slugify
class Snippet(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=80)
    slug = models.SlugField(blank=True, null=True)
    body = models.TextField()
def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.slug = slugify(self.title)
        super().save(*args, **kwargs)
def get_absolute_url(self):
        return f'/{self.slug}'

Using save() method. Because, we want to generate the slug from the title.

$ ./manage.py makemigrations
$ ./manage.py migrate
$ ./manage.py shell
In [1]: from myapp.models import Snippet
In [2]: Snippet.objects.create(title='t1', body='<h1></h1').save()
In [3]: Snippet.objects.create(title='t2', body='<h2></h2').save()

Now, we want to create a real path and our detail views and this one is going to take a a slug.

myapp/urls.py:

from django.urls import path
from myapp.views import about, snippet_detail
urlpatterns = [
    path('<slug:slug>/', snippet_detail),
    path('about/', about, name='about'),
]

myapp/views.py:

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404
from .models import Snippet
def about(request):
    return HttpResponse('about page')
def snippet_detail(request, slug):
    snippet = get_object_or_404(Snippet, slug=slug)
    return HttpResponse(f'the detailview for slug of {slug}')

Running the application

• http://127.0.0.1:8000/h2/, the detailview for slug of h2.

django_sitemap/urls.py:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.contrib.sitemaps.views import sitemap
from django.urls import include, path
from myapp.sitemaps import SnippetSitemap, StaticViewSitemap
sitemaps = {'static': StaticViewSitemap, 'snippet': SnippetSitemap}
urlpatterns = [
    path('', include('myapp.urls')),
    path('sitemap.xml', sitemap, {'sitemaps': sitemaps}),
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
]

myapp/sitemaps.py:

from django.contrib.sitemaps import Sitemap
from django.shortcuts import reverse
from .models import Snippet
class StaticViewSitemap(Sitemap):
    def items(self):
        return ['about']
def location(self, item):
        return reverse(item)
class SnippetSitemap(Sitemap):
    def items(self):
        return Snippet.objects.all()

Running the application

• http://127.0.0.1:8000/sitemap.xml, we get an XML file which contains a location.

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <url>
        <loc>http://127.0.0.1:8000/about/</loc>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>http://127.0.0.1:8000/h1</loc>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>http://127.0.0.1:8000/h2</loc>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>http://127.0.0.1:8000/h3</loc>
    </url>
</urlset>

Conclusion

If you look in the django site maps documentation. You will find other properties which can use on the site map to tell search engines more about it. In this article you’ve learned how to create a site map.The source code of the application is available on GitHub.