How to make a Sitemap with google-sitemap_gen on Nginx

I wanted to make a sitemap for my site to submit to google, but I didn’t want to pay for a sitemap generator, as my site is not a commercial site.

google-sitemap_gen is one of the first resources I found.

The Problem is…

The problem is that it is described for use with apache but I am using the nginx server. A bit more searching lead me to this page and Wing Tang Wong’s answer.

He Said

He said he made a url list by spidering with wget, and writing to wget-log. Then use that source of urls to make the sitemap.xml with the google-sitemap_gen. I donwloaded the sitemap generator package and unzipped it.

Next I modified the config file like he says on the linked page above.

#<?xml version="1.0" encoding=UTF-8?>
<site
base_url="http://YOURDOMAIN.com/"
store_into="/var/www/sitemap_gen-1.4/sitemap.xml"
verbose=1
>
<url href="http://YOURDOMAIN.com/stats?q=name" />
<url
href="http://YOURDOMAIN.com/stats?q=age"
lastmod="2004-11-14T01:00:00-07:00"
changefreq=yearly
priority="0.3"
/>
<urllist path="urllist.txt" encoding=UTF-8 />
<!-- Exclude URLs that end with a '~' (IE: emacs backup files) -->
<filter action=drop type=wildcard pattern="*~" />
<!-- Exclude URLs within UNIX-style hidden files or directories -->
<filter action=drop type=regexp pattern="/\.[^/]*" />

He spidered with

wget -mk —spider -r -l2 http://YOURDOMAIN.COM/

but I found it worked if I did it like this:

 wget -mk --spider -r -l2 http://YOURDOMAIN.COM/ -o wget-log

Then his next command to make the urllist worked nicely:

cat wget-log | tr ' ' '\012' | grep "^http" | egrep -vi "[?]|[.]jpg$" | sort -u > urllist.txt

No problems after ensuring that the wget-log file was written and in place. then all that remained was to use the google-sitemap_gen with the command:

python sitemap_gen.py --config=example_config.xml 

And presto! You have a nice sitemap. Just send it to google on their webmaster tools page.