TommyBlue.it

Waiting for a sitemap generator inside the core of Ghost (planned as “future implementation”) I decided to implement a way to generate an up-to-date sitemap.xml during deployment. As you can read in the previous post I’m deploying this blog with Capistrano and capistrano-node-deploy. So I added a deploy:generate_sitemap task which is executed at the end of the deployment process.

This is the Capfile extract:

namespace :deploy do
  task :generate_sitemap do
    run "cd #{latest_release} && ./ghost_sitemap.sh #{latest_release}"
  end
end
after "node:restart", "deploy:generate_sitemap"

So at the end of the deployment the ghost_sitemap.sh script is executed. The script is placed in the blog root and is a personalized version of the code you can find here: http://ghost.centminmod.com/ghost-sitemap-generator/

It essentially does 3 things:

• Puts the sitemap.xml link in the robots.txt file
• Scans (using wget) the website and generates the sitemap.xml file in the content folder
• Notifies Google Webmaster Tools

What I changed of the original script is:

url="www.tommyblue.it"
webroot="${1}/content"
path="${webroot}/sitemap.xml"
user='<USER>'
group='<GROUP>'

user and group will be used to chmod the sitemap.xml file, so check that the web user (probably www-data) can read that file.

This process has a big problem: the sitemap is generated only during deploy, not when I publish a new post. A workaround is to run cap deploy:generate_sitemap after a new post is published.

It works but I need an automatic way. Any idea?