What should I be using for sitemap generation for rails on heroku?

Question

As a beginner to rails, I\'m finding the generation of sitemaps on Heroku to be extremely daunting due to its read-only limitations. However, a sitemap is fundamental to my webs

Answer 1

I figured out a small trick that makes it possible to dynamically generate the sitemap file but persist it for later calls on Heroku.

It works great for small\medium size projects, if you have a big\huge project and thousand of pages that changes endlessly , please consider using S3 to store the sitemap file.

Those are the steps:

1. use the sitemap_generator gem as instructed here https://github.com/kjvarga/sitemap_generator

2. after bundle, run rake sitemap:install, it will create a config/sitemap.rb file for you

3. edit the config/sitemap.rb file to look like this

   SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.default_host = [your host name goes here]

   SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.public_path = File.join(Rails.root, 'tmp').to_s

   SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.compress = false

   SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.create do

   [all your site pages add commands goes here]

   end

• regarding the host name, I suggest it to be "#{ENV['HOST_PROTOCOL']}://#{ENV['HOST_NAME']}" (and of course add the appropriate environment variables) so you could change it on different environments.
• regarding compress, start with false, make sure all is working great for you and change it later if it is a big file.

4. create your sitemap controller file - app/controllers/sitemap_controller.rb

5. Edit the sitemap controller file to look like this

require 'rake'

class SitemapController < ApplicationController
  def index
    file_name = File.join(Rails.root, 'tmp', 'sitemap.xml').to_s
    
    unless File.exist?(file_name)
      Rails.application.load_tasks
      Rake::Task['sitemap:refresh:no_ping'].invoke
    end
    
    # it's better to be safe than sorry 
    if File.exist?(file_name)
      respond_to do |format|
        format.xml { render file: file_name }
      end
    else
      render file: 'public/404.html', status: :not_found, layout: false
    end
  end
end

6. Add the index action to your routes.rb file

resources :sitemap, only: %i[index], constraints: ->(req) { req.format == :xml }

7. restart/deploy you server and go to /sitemap.xml

Enjoy