Google sitemap files for Rails projects

Question

Is there an easy way to create a sitemaps file for Rails projects? Especially for dynamic sites (such as Stack Overflow for example) there should be a way to dynamically cre

Answer 1

I love John Topley's answer because it is so simple and elegant, without the need for a gem. But it's a bit dated, so I've updated his answer for Rails 4 and Google Webmaster Tools' latest sitemap guidelines.

config/routes.rb:

get 'sitemap.xml', :to => 'sitemap#index', :defaults => { :format => 'xml' }

app/controllers/sitemap_controller.rb:

class SitemapController < ApplicationController
  layout nil

  def index
    headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/xml'
    last_post = Post.last
    if stale?(:etag => last_post, :last_modified => last_post.updated_at.utc)
      respond_to do |format|
        format.xml { @posts = Post.all }
      end
    end
  end
end

app/views/sitemap/index.xml.haml:

!!! XML
%urlset{:xmlns => "http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"}
  - for post in @posts
    %url
      %loc #{post_url(post)}/
      %lastmod=post.updated_at.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
      %changefreq monthly
      %priority 0.5

You can test it by bringing up localhost:3000/sitemap.xml.