Helios::Sitemap

Sitemap generation with S3 storage and IndexNow submission for Rails. Designed for ephemeral disk systems (Heroku, Docker) where you can't persist generated sitemaps to disk.

Flow: Generate sitemap -> Upload to S3 -> Serve from your app at /sitemap.xml -> Submit to IndexNow

Installation

Add to your Gemfile:

gem "helios-sitemap"

Then bundle install.

Configuration

Create an initializer at config/initializers/helios_sitemap.rb:

Helios::Sitemap.configure do |config|
  config.default_host = "https://example.com"

  # S3 storage (defaults to ENV vars if not set)
  config.aws_bucket     = ENV["AWS_SITEMAP_BUCKET"]
  config.aws_region     = ENV["AWS_REGION"]
  config.aws_access_key_id     = ENV["AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID"]
  config.aws_secret_access_key = ENV["AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"]

  # IndexNow (defaults to ENV vars if not set)
  config.indexnow_domain  = ENV["INDEXNOW_DOMAIN"]
  config.indexnow_api_key = ENV["INDEXNOW_API_KEY"]

  # Define what goes in your sitemap
  config.sitemap_entries = ->(sitemap) {
    sitemap.add "/", changefreq: "weekly", priority: 1.0
    Post.published.find_each do |post|
      sitemap.add "/#{post.slug}", changefreq: "weekly", priority: 0.7
    end
  }

  # Define URLs to submit to IndexNow
  config.indexnow_urls = -> {
    urls = ["https://example.com/"]
    Post.published.find_each do |post|
      urls << "https://example.com/#{post.slug}"
    end
    urls
  }
end

Routes

Mount the engine in your config/routes.rb:

mount Helios::Sitemap::Engine, at: "/"

This provides:

GET /sitemap.xml - Serves the sitemap XML from S3
GET /sitemap.xml.gz - Serves the gzipped sitemap from S3

Generating & Uploading

Trigger a sitemap refresh by running the job:

Helios::Sitemap::RefreshJob.perform_later

You can schedule this however you prefer (cron, recurring job, after publishing content, etc.).

Environment Variables