Appending Lines To Xml

Showing how to easily append lines at the end of an XML file (like your sitemap).

So I faced an interesting problem the other day, where I discovered my CV's downloadable PDF link isn't indexed (aka included in my sitemap.xml file). And it should be. So we've established that PDFs should end up in our sitemap.

To achieve that, I'll run you through a snippet to append it as an entry to the sitemap. The way we'll go through this is first set up a basic working node module and then later (maybe?) also turn it into a Metalsmith plugin (WIP).

We'll need Node's native fs and path modules and also the file's name (which you can later make dynamic, but currently we'll settle for the default sitemap.xml value).

const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');
const fileName = 'sitemap.xml';

Next we'll define the sitemap's closing tag, so we could replace the length of it when we write to the file later (you'll hear more 'bout it in a bit).

const closingTag = '</urlset>';

Then we'll go ahead and create a buffer containing our new content (the line we're appending) and the closing tag we just defined
...aand also need to know the file's path and size.

let content = `<url> <loc>https://andreasvirkus.me/assets/cv/CV-Andreas-Johan-Virkus.pdf</loc> </url>`,
    buffer = new Buffer(content+ '\n' + closingTag),
    filePath = path.join(__dirname, '..', 'dist', fileName),
    fileSize = fs.statSync(filePath)['size'];

Now all that's left to do is to open up the XML file and replace the end of the file (length of the closing tag) with our freshly defined buffer:

fs.open(filePath, 'r+', (err, fd) => {
    // File was most likely not found or we don't have permission to write
    if (err) throw err;

    fs.write(fd, buffer, 0, buffer.length, fileSize - closingTag.length, err => {
        if (err) throw err;
    });
});

So what we've got so far is this:

// appendToSitemap.js

const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');
const fileName = 'sitemap.xml';
const closingTag = '</urlset>';

let content = `<url> <loc>https://andreasvirkus.me/assets/cv/CV-Andreas-Johan-Virkus.pdf</loc> </url>`,
    buffer = new Buffer(content+ '\n' + closingTag),
    filePath = path.join(__dirname, '..', 'dist', fileName),
    fileSize = fs.statSync(filePath)['size'];

fs.open(filePath, 'r+', (err, fd) => {
    fs.write(fd, buffer, 0, buffer.length, fileSize - closingTag.length, err => {
        if (err) throw err;
    });
});

Now we can run it as any other Node script: node appendToSitemap.js and it should add our content variable as the last entry of the file's urlset.

Since I wish to automate this process, I'll add it to my Metalsmith build's callback as a module:

const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');
const fileName = 'sitemap.xml';
const closingTag = '</urlset>';

module.exports = function(content) {
    let buffer = new Buffer(content+ '\n' + closingTag),
        filePath = path.join(__dirname, '..', 'dist', fileName),
        fileSize = fs.statSync(filePath)['size'];

    fs.open(filePath, 'r+', (err, fd) => {
        fs.write(fd, buffer, 0, buffer.length, fileSize - closingTag.length, err => {
            if (err) throw err;
        });
    });
};

And I can call it in my build.js file:

metalsmith(__dirname)
    .source('./src')
    .destination('./dist')
    .clean(true)
    /**
     * Using any amount of plugins here
     * ...
     */
    .build(function (err) {
        if (err) throw err;

        // Update sitemap
        appendToSitemap(`<url> <loc>https://andreasvirkus.me/assets/cv/CV-Andreas-Johan-Virkus.pdf</loc> </url>`);
    });