The generate-sitemap GitHub action generates a sitemap for a website hosted on GitHub Pages, and has the following features:

• Support for both xml and txt sitemaps (you choose using one of the action's inputs).
• When generating an xml sitemap, it uses the last commit date of each file to generate the <lastmod> tag in the sitemap entry.
• Supports URLs for html and pdf files in the sitemap, and has inputs to control the included file types (defaults include both html and pdf files in the sitemap).
• Checks content of html files for <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> directives, excluding any that do from the sitemap.
• Parses a robots.txt, if present at the root of the website, excluding any URLs from the sitemap that match Disallow: rules for User-agent: *.
• Sorts the sitemap entries in a consistent order, such that the URLs are first sorted by depth in the directory structure (i.e., pages at the website root appear first, etc), and then pages at the same depth are sorted alphabetically.

The generate-sitemap GitHub action is designed to be used in combination with other GitHub Actions. For example, it does not commit and push the generated sitemap. See the Examples for examples of combining with other actions in your workflow.

This action relies on actions/checkout@v2 with fetch-depth: 0. Setting the fetch-depth to 0 for the checkout action ensures that the generate-sitemap action will have access to the commit history, which is used for generating the <lastmod> tags in the sitemap.xml file. If you instead use the default when applying the checkout action, the <lastmod> tags will be incorrect. So be sure to include the following as a step in your workflow:

    steps:
    - name: Checkout the repo
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        fetch-depth: 0 

Required The path to the root of the website relative to the root of the repository. Default . is appropriate in most cases, such as whenever the root of your Pages site is the root of the repository itself. If you are using this for a GitHub Pages site in the docs directory, such as for a documentation website, then just pass docs for this input.

Required This is the url to your website. You must specify this for your sitemap to be meaningful. It defaults to https://web.address.of.your.nifty.website/ for demonstration purposes.

Required This flag determines whether html files are included in your sitemap. Default: true.

Required This flag determines whether pdf files are included in your sitemap. Default: true.

Required Use this to specify the sitemap format. Default: xml. The sitemap.xml generated by the default will contain lastmod dates that are generated using the last commit dates of each file. Setting this input to anything other than xml will generate a plain text sitemap.txt simply listing the urls.

The generated sitemap is placed in the root of the website. This output is the path to the generated sitemap file relative to the root of the repository. If you didn't use the path-to-root input, then this output should simply be the name of the sitemap file (sitemap.xml or sitemap.txt).

This output provides the number of urls in the sitemap.

This output provides the number of urls excluded from the sitemap due to <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> within html files.

In this example workflow, we use all of the default inputs except for the base-url-path input. The result will be a sitemap.xml file in the root of the repository. After completion, it then simply echos the outputs.

name: Generate xml sitemap

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  sitemap_job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Generate a sitemap
    steps:
    - name: Checkout the repo
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        fetch-depth: 0 
    - name: Generate the sitemap
      id: sitemap
      uses: cicirello/[email protected]
      with:
        base-url-path: https://THE.URL.TO.YOUR.PAGE/
    - name: Output stats
      run: |
        echo "sitemap-path = ${{ steps.sitemap.outputs.sitemap-path }}"
        echo "url-count = ${{ steps.sitemap.outputs.url-count }}"
        echo "excluded-count = ${{ steps.sitemap.outputs.excluded-count }}"

This example workflow illustrates how you might use this to generate a sitemap for a Pages site in the docs directory of the repository. It also demonstrates excluding pdf files, and configuring a plain text sitemap.

name: Generate API sitemap

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  sitemap_job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Generate a sitemap
    steps:
    - name: Checkout the repo
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        fetch-depth: 0 
    - name: Generate the sitemap
      id: sitemap
      uses: cicirello/[email protected]
      with:
        base-url-path: https://THE.URL.TO.YOUR.PAGE/
        path-to-root: docs
        include-pdf: false
        sitemap-format: txt
    - name: Output stats
      run: |
        echo "sitemap-path = ${{ steps.sitemap.outputs.sitemap-path }}"
        echo "url-count = ${{ steps.sitemap.outputs.url-count }}"
        echo "excluded-count = ${{ steps.sitemap.outputs.excluded-count }}"

Presumably you want to do something with your sitemap once it is generated. In this example workflow, we combine it with the action peter-evans/create-pull-request. First, the cicirello/generate-sitemap action generates the sitemap. And then the peter-evans/create-pull-request monitors for changes, and if the sitemap changed will create a pull request.

name: Generate xml sitemap

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  sitemap_job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Generate a sitemap
    steps:
    - name: Checkout the repo
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        fetch-depth: 0 
    - name: Generate the sitemap
      id: sitemap
      uses: cicirello/[email protected]
      with:
        base-url-path: https://THE.URL.TO.YOUR.PAGE/
    - name: Create Pull Request
      uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v3
      with:
        title: "Automated sitemap update"
        body: > 
          Sitemap updated by the [generate-sitemap](https://github.com/cicirello/generate-sitemap) 
          GitHub action. Automated pull-request generated by the 
          [create-pull-request](https://github.com/peter-evans/create-pull-request) GitHub action.

The scripts and documentation for this GitHub action is released under the MIT License.