Generating a Sitemap with Flask and Flask-FlatPages

After creating this Flask based site, I needed an easy way to generate a sitemap that plays nice with search engines and web crawlers.

Since I was using Flask-FlatPages, it was quite simple.

Getting Every Blog Post

First, I created a simple function to return all of my blog posts from Flask-FlatPages. This function only returns blog posts but it could be adapted to return pages as well.

def get_all_posts():
    return [post for post in flatpages if post.path.startswith(POST_DIR)]

When I run the function, I get a list of Page objects for each blog post.

>>> get_all_posts()
[<Page 'posts/post1.html'>, <Page 'posts/post2.html'>]

Adding a New Route

Now I needed a new Flask route to serve requests at "/sitemap.xml".

@app.route("/sitemap.xml")
def sitemap():
    posts = get_all_posts()
    posts.sort(key=lambda item: item["date"], reverse=False)
    return render_template("sitemap.xml", posts=posts)

Once I retrieve my blog posts using the get_all_posts() function, I sort them oldest to newest, then send them to my sitemap.xml template (that I still needed to create).

Sitemap Basics

A basic sitemap.xml is pretty straightforward. I only need the encoding, a urlset, and then a list of the urls for each of my posts.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
  </url>
</urlset>

Sitemap Jinja Template

Here's my final sitemap.xml Jinja template.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
  <loc>https://www.url.com</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
  <loc>https://www.url.com/about.html</loc>
  </url>
  {% for post in posts %}
  <url>
  <loc>{{ url_for("post", name=post.path, _external=True) }}</loc>
  </url>
  {% endfor %}
</urlset>

Since my website is simple, I just hardcoded the home and about pages first. Next, I have Jinja iterate through all of the page objects that I provided via my route and the render_template() function.

Rendered Sitemap

Once rendered, my sitemap.xml looks like this.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
  <loc>https://www.url.com</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
  <loc>https://www.url.com/about.html</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
  <loc>https://www.url.com/post1.html</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
  <loc>https://www.url.com/post2.html</loc>
  </url>
</urlset>

After my home and about pages, each individual post (post1.html, post2.html...) is listed one after another. Every time I add a new blog post it will automatically get added to the bottom.

Well, that wasn't hard at all! Now off, to submit my sitemap.xml to Google.

View my live sitemap.xml.