Sitemap is a package built specifically for Laravel 4 that will help you generate XML sitemaps for Google. Based on laravel-sitemap this package operates in a slightly different way to better fit the needs of our project. A facade is used to access the sitemap class and we have added the ability to produce sitemap indexes as well as sitemaps. Furthermore, it's tested.

Read more about sitemaps and how to use them efficiently on Google Webmaster Tools.

Simply pop this in your composer.json file and run composer update (however your Composer is installed).

"watson/sitemap": "1.1.*"

Now, add the service provider to your app/config/app.php file.

'Watson\Sitemap\SitemapServiceProvider'

If you have a large number of links (50,000+) you will want to break your sitemaps out into seperate sitemaps with a sitemap index linking them all. You add sitemap indexes using Sitemap::addSitemap($loc, $lastmod) and then you return the sitemap index with Sitemap::renderSitemapIndex(). The $lastmod variable will be parsed by Carbon and then converted to the right format for a sitemap.

Here is an example controller that produces a sitemap index.

class SitemapsController extends BaseController
{
	public function index()
	{
		// Get a general sitemap.
		Sitemap::addSitemap('/sitemaps/general');

		// You can use the route helpers too.
		Sitemap::addSitemap(URL::route('sitemaps.posts'));
		Sitemap::addSitemap(route('sitemaps.users'));

		// Return the sitemap to the client.
		return Sitemap::renderSitemapIndex();
	}
}

Similarly to sitemap indexes, you just add tags for each item in your sitemap using Sitemap::addTag($loc, $lastmod, $changefreq, $priority). You can return the sitemap with Sitemap::renderSitemap(). Again, the $lastmod variable will be parsed by Carbon and convered to the right format for the sitemap.

Here is an example controller that produces a sitemap for blog psots.

class SitemapsController extends BaseController
{
	pulblic function posts()
	{
		$posts = Post::all();

		foreach ($posts as $post)
		{
			Sitemap::addTag(route('posts.show', $post->id), $post->created_at, 'daily', '0.8');
		}

		return Sitemap::renderSitemap();
	}
}

To publish the configuration file for the sitemap package, simply run this Artisan command:

php artisan config:publish watson/sitemap

Then take a look in app/config/packages/watson/sitemap/config.php to see what is available.

By default, caching is disabled. If you would likd to enable caching, simply set cache_enabled in the configuration file to true. You can then specify how long you would like your views to be cached for. Keep in mind that when enabled, caching will affect each and every request made to the sitemap package.