Create a text sitemap

You can help search engines indexing your site by creating a sitemap. The simplest is a text file containing all page links:

built sitemap.txt

https://mysite.com/
https://mysite.com/post/
https://mysite.com/post/one/
https://mysite.com/post/two/
https://mysite.com/post/three/
https://mysite.com/about/

Define a domain #

Sitemaps normally show fully qualified URLs including the domain. Publican does not require a domain, but you can add it as a global property in your publican.config.js configuration file.

The following code sets a local or real domain depending on whether the site is running locally in development or for production. Note you should not append a / slash to the domain since the root path is set by Publican.

publican.config.js excerpt

const isDev = (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development');

// jsTACs globals
tacs.config = tacs.config || {};
tacs.config.domain = isDev ? 'http://localhost:8000' : 'https://mysite.com';

Create sitemap.txt #

A src/content/sitemap.txt file can now be defined. It does not require a template and outputs all pages where the front matter index value is not false:

sitemap.txt

---
index: false
---
${
  (toArray( tacs.all ))
    .map(p => p.index !== false ?
      `${ tacs.config.domain }${ p.link }\n` :
      ''
    )
}

Create robots.txt #

You can inform search engines that sitemaps are available by creating a src/content/sitemap.txt file with the following content. Note that both text and XML sitemaps are specified:

robots.txt

---
index: false
---
User-agent: *
Sitemap: ${ tacs.config.domain }${ tacs.root }sitemap.xml
Sitemap: ${ tacs.config.domain }${ tacs.root }sitemap.txt