Quickly Generating XML Sitemaps in Ruby

To simply add XML sitemap generation to a Ruby program or script the sitemap-generator gem is all one needs. However the documentation for the library is quite heavy and filtering out what's needed to incorporate its functionality into a simple script can take a while. But really all it takes is this:

gem install sitemap-generator
vim sm-gen.rb

001  # sm-gen.rb
002  require 'sitemap-generator'
003  
004  # optional for verbose output
005  SitemapGenerator.verbose = true
006  SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.verbose = true
007  
008  # required
009  SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.default_host = 'http://www.example.com'
010  SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.public_path = '.'
011  
012  SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.create do
013    # for each url, adjust as needed
014    # creates an entry for http://www.example.com/example/url/index.html
015    add 'example/url/index.html', :changefreq => 'monthly',
016      :lastmod => File.mtime(path).strftime("%FT%T%:z"),
017      :priority => 1.0
018  end

Where public_path defines the directory, relative to the script's working directory, where the generated sitemap should be placed. The script might produce an index for a bunch of sitemaps. Regardless of the behavior, by default the file to add to robots.txt and search engines is always sitemap.xml.gz.

To build the sitemap run
ruby sm-gen.rb

The sitemap-generator gem can do a lot more though. See the documentation linked above.