sitemap

sitemap is a high-level streaming sitemap-generating library/CLI that makes creating sitemap XML files easy. What is a sitemap?

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Generate a one time sitemap from a list of urls
• Example of using sitemap.js with express
• Generating more than one sitemap
• Options you can pass
• Examples
• API
• Maintainers
• License

Installation

npm install --save sitemap

Requires Node.js >= 22.12. This package is ESM-only — it no longer ships a CommonJS build. Load it with import; require('sitemap') works only on Node versions with built-in require(esm) support, which is why the minimum is 22.12 rather than 22.0.

Generate a one time sitemap from a list of urls

If you are just looking to take a giant list of URLs and turn it into some sitemaps, try out our CLI. The cli can also parse, update and validate existing sitemaps.

npx sitemap < listofurls.txt # `npx sitemap -h` for more examples and a list of options.

For programmatic one time generation of a sitemap try:

import { SitemapStream, streamToPromise } from 'sitemap'
import { Readable } from 'stream'

// An array with your links
const links = [{ url: '/page-1/',  changefreq: 'daily', priority: 0.3  }]

// Create a stream to write to
const stream = new SitemapStream( { hostname: 'https://...' } )

// Return a promise that resolves with your XML string
return streamToPromise(Readable.from(links).pipe(stream)).then((data) =>
  data.toString()
)

Serve a sitemap from a server and periodically update it

Use this if you have less than 50 thousand urls. See SitemapAndIndexStream for if you have more.

import express from 'express'
import { SitemapStream, streamToPromise } from 'sitemap'
import { createGzip } from 'zlib'
import { Readable } from 'stream'

const app = express()
let sitemap

app.get('/sitemap.xml', function(req, res) {
  res.header('Content-Type', 'application/xml');
  res.header('Content-Encoding', 'gzip');
  // if we have a cached entry send it
  if (sitemap) {
    res.send(sitemap)
    return
  }

  try {
    const smStream = new SitemapStream({ hostname: 'https://example.com/' })
    const pipeline = smStream.pipe(createGzip())

    // pipe your entries or directly write them.
    smStream.write({ url: '/page-1/',  changefreq: 'daily', priority: 0.3 })
    smStream.write({ url: '/page-2/',  changefreq: 'monthly',  priority: 0.7 })
    smStream.write({ url: '/page-3/'})    // changefreq: 'weekly',  priority: 0.5
    smStream.write({ url: '/page-4/',   img: "http://urlTest.com" })
    /* or use
    Readable.from([{url: '/page-1'}...]).pipe(smStream)
    if you are looking to avoid writing your own loop.
    */

    // cache the response
    streamToPromise(pipeline).then(sm => sitemap = sm)
    // make sure to attach a write stream such as streamToPromise before ending
    smStream.end()
    // stream write the response
    pipeline.pipe(res).on('error', (e) => {throw e})
  } catch (e) {
    console.error(e)
    res.status(500).end()
  }
})

app.listen(3000, () => {
  console.log('listening')
});

Create sitemap and index files from one large list

If you know you are definitely going to have more than 50,000 urls in your sitemap, you can use this slightly more complex interface to create a new sitemap every 45,000 entries and add that file to a sitemap index.

import { createReadStream, createWriteStream } from 'fs'
import { resolve } from 'path'
import { createGzip } from 'zlib'
import { simpleSitemapAndIndex, lineSeparatedURLsToSitemapOptions } from 'sitemap'

// writes sitemaps and index out to the destination you provide.
simpleSitemapAndIndex({
  hostname: 'https://example.com',
  destinationDir: './',
  sourceData: lineSeparatedURLsToSitemapOptions(
    createReadStream('./your-data.json.txt')
  ),
  // sourceData can also be:
  // sourceData: [{ url: '/page-1/', changefreq: 'daily'}, ...],
  // or
  // sourceData: './your-data.json.txt',
  limit: 45000, // optional, default: 50000
  gzip: true, // optional, default: true
  publicBasePath: '/sitemaps/', // optional, default: './'
  xslUrl: 'https://example.com/sitemap.xsl', // optional XSL stylesheet
}).then(() => {
  // Do follow up actions
})

Want to customize that?

import { createReadStream, createWriteStream } from 'fs'
import { resolve } from 'path'
import { createGzip } from 'zlib'
import { Readable } from 'stream'
import { SitemapAndIndexStream, SitemapStream, lineSeparatedURLsToSitemapOptions } from 'sitemap'

const sms = new SitemapAndIndexStream({
  limit: 50000, // defaults to 45k
  lastmodDateOnly: false, // print date not time
  // SitemapAndIndexStream will call this user provided function every time
  // it needs to create a new sitemap file. You merely need to return a stream
  // for it to write the sitemap urls to and the expected url where that sitemap will be hosted
  getSitemapStream: (i) => {
    const sitemapStream = new SitemapStream({ hostname: 'https://example.com' });
    // if your server automatically serves sitemap.xml.gz when requesting sitemap.xml leave this line be
    // otherwise you will need to add .gz here and remove it a couple lines below so that both the index 
    // and the actual file have a .gz extension
    const path = `./sitemap-${i}.xml`; 

    const ws = sitemapStream
      .pipe(createGzip()) // compress the output of the sitemap
      .pipe(createWriteStream(resolve(path + '.gz'))); // write it to sitemap-NUMBER.xml

    return [new URL(path, 'https://example.com/subdir/').toString(), sitemapStream, ws];
  },
});

// when reading from a file
lineSeparatedURLsToSitemapOptions(
  createReadStream('./your-data.json.txt')
)
.pipe(sms)
.pipe(createGzip())
.pipe(createWriteStream(resolve('./sitemap-index.xml.gz')));

// or reading straight from an in-memory array
sms
.pipe(createGzip())
.pipe(createWriteStream(resolve('./sitemap-index.xml.gz')));

const arrayOfSitemapItems = [{ url: '/page-1/', changefreq: 'daily'}, ...]
Readable.from(arrayOfSitemapItems).pipe(sms)
// or
arrayOfSitemapItems.forEach(item => sms.write(item))
sms.end() // necessary to let it know you've got nothing else to write

Options you can pass

import { SitemapStream, streamToPromise } from 'sitemap'

const smStream = new SitemapStream({
  hostname: 'http://www.mywebsite.com',
  xslUrl: "https://example.com/style.xsl",
  lastmodDateOnly: false, // print date not time
  xmlns: { // trim the xml namespace
    news: true, // flip to false to omit the xml namespace for news
    xhtml: true,
    image: true,
    video: true,
    custom: [
      'xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"',
      'xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"',
    ],
  }
 })
// coalesce stream to value
// alternatively you can pipe to another stream
streamToPromise(smStream).then(console.log)

smStream.write({
  url: '/page1',
  changefreq: 'weekly',
  priority: 0.8, // A hint to the crawler that it should prioritize this over items less than 0.8
})

// each sitemap entry supports many options
// See [Sitemap Item Options](./api.md#sitemap-item-options) below for details
smStream.write({
  url: 'http://test.com/page-1/',
  img: [
    {
      url: 'http://test.com/img1.jpg',
      caption: 'An image',
      title: 'The Title of Image One',
      geoLocation: 'London, United Kingdom',
      license: 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/'
    },
    {
      url: 'http://test.com/img2.jpg',
      caption: 'Another image',
      title: 'The Title of Image Two',
      geoLocation: 'London, United Kingdom',
      license: 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/'
    }
  ],
  video: [
    {
      thumbnail_loc: 'http://test.com/tmbn1.jpg',
      title: 'A video title',
      description: 'This is a video'
    },
    {
      thumbnail_loc: 'http://test.com/tmbn2.jpg',
      title: 'A video with an attribute',
      description: 'This is another video',
      'player_loc': 'http://www.example.com/videoplayer.mp4?video=123',
      'player_loc:autoplay': 'ap=1',
      'player_loc:allow_embed': 'yes'
    }
  ],
  links: [
    { lang: 'en', url: 'http://test.com/page-1/' },
    { lang: 'ja', url: 'http://test.com/page-1/ja/' }
  ],
  androidLink: 'android-app://com.company.test/page-1/',
  news: {
    publication: {
      name: 'The Example Times',
      language: 'en'
    },
    genres: 'PressRelease, Blog',
    publication_date: '2008-12-23',
    title: 'Companies A, B in Merger Talks',
    keywords: 'business, merger, acquisition, A, B',
    stock_tickers: 'NASDAQ:A, NASDAQ:B'
  }
})
// indicate there is nothing left to write
smStream.end()

Filtering sitemap entries during parsing

You can filter or delete items from a sitemap while parsing by piping through a custom Transform stream. This is useful when you want to selectively process only certain URLs from an existing sitemap.

import { createReadStream } from 'fs'
import { Transform } from 'stream'
import { XMLToSitemapItemStream } from 'sitemap'

// Create a filter that only keeps certain URLs
const filterStream = new Transform({
  objectMode: true,
  transform(item, encoding, callback) {
    // Only keep URLs containing '/blog/'
    if (item.url.includes('/blog/')) {
      callback(undefined, item)  // Keep this item
    } else {
      callback()  // Skip this item (effectively "deleting" it)
    }
  }
})

// Parse and filter
createReadStream('./sitemap.xml')
  .pipe(new XMLToSitemapItemStream())
  .pipe(filterStream)
  .on('data', (item) => {
    console.log('Filtered URL:', item.url)
  })

You can also chain multiple filters together, filter based on priority/changefreq, or use the filtered results to generate a new sitemap. See examples/filter-sitemap.js for more filtering patterns.

Examples

For more examples see the examples directory

API

Full API docs can be found here

Maintainers

• @ekalinin
• @derduher

License

See LICENSE file.