Sitemap Generator

Generate XML sitemaps by crawling a website. Use when a user needs to create a sitemap.xml for SEO, audit site structure, discover all pages on a domain, or generate a sitemap for submission to Google Search Console or other search engines. Handles BFS crawling with configurable depth, page limits, and polite delays.

Crawl any website and produce a standards-compliant XML sitemap ready for search engine submission.

Quick Start

python3 scripts/sitemap_gen.py https://example.com

Output: sitemap.xml in the current directory.

Commands

# Basic — crawl and write sitemap.xml
python3 scripts/sitemap_gen.py https://example.com

# Custom output path
python3 scripts/sitemap_gen.py https://example.com -o /tmp/sitemap.xml

# Limit crawl scope
python3 scripts/sitemap_gen.py https://example.com --max-pages 500 --max-depth 3

# Polite crawling with delay
python3 scripts/sitemap_gen.py https://example.com --delay 1.0

# Set SEO hints
python3 scripts/sitemap_gen.py https://example.com --changefreq daily --priority 0.8

# Verbose progress
python3 scripts/sitemap_gen.py https://example.com -v

# Pipe to stdout
python3 scripts/sitemap_gen.py https://example.com -o -

Options

Flag	Default	Description
--output, -o	sitemap.xml	Output file path (use - for stdout)
--max-pages	200	Maximum pages to crawl
--max-depth	5	Maximum link depth from start URL
--delay	0.2	Seconds between requests
--timeout	10	Request timeout in seconds
--changefreq	weekly	Sitemap changefreq hint
--priority	0.5	Sitemap priority hint (0.0–1.0)
--verbose, -v	off	Print crawl progress to stderr

Dependencies

pip install requests beautifulsoup4

Notes

• Only crawls same-domain pages (no external links)
• Skips binary files (images, CSS, JS, PDFs, fonts)
• Respects the delay setting to avoid overwhelming servers
• Output conforms to the sitemaps.org 0.9 protocol