Sitemap generator


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A sitemap directs search engines to the pages of interest in a web site so that the search engines can intelligently crawl your site. In the case of Evergreen, the primary pages of interest are the bibliographic record detail pages.

The sitemap generator script creates sitemaps that adhere to the http://sitemaps.org specification, including:

limiting the number of URLs per sitemap file to no more than 50,000 URLs;
providing the date that the bibliographic record was last edited, so that once a search engine has crawled all of your sites' record detail pages, it only has to reindex those pages that are new or have changed since the last crawl;
generating a sitemap index file that points to each of the sitemap files.

Running the sitemap generator

The sitemap_generator script must be invoked with the following argument:

--lib-hostname: specifies the hostname for the catalog (for example, --lib-hostname https://catalog.example.com); all URLs will be generated appended to this hostname

Therefore, the following arguments are useful for generating multiple sitemaps per Evergreen instance:

--lib-shortname: limit the list of record URLs to those which have copies owned by the designated library or any of its children;
--prefix: provides a prefix for the sitemap index file names

Other options enable you to override the OpenSRF configuration file and the database connection credentials, but the default settings are generally fine.

Note that on very large Evergreen instances, sitemaps can consume hundreds of megabytes of disk space, so ensure that your Evergreen instance has enough room before running the script.

Sitemap details

The sitemap generator script includes located URIs as well as items listed in the asset.opac_visible_copies materialized view, and checks the children or ancestors of the requested libraries for holdings as well.

Scheduling

To enable search engines to maintain a fresh index of your bibliographic records, you may want to include the script in your cron jobs on a nightly or weekly basis.

Sitemap files are generated in the same directory from which the script is invoked, so a cron entry will look something like:

12 2 * * * cd /openils/var/web && /openils/bin/sitemap_generator

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