appending lines to XML

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.

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 to first set up a basic working node module and then later also turn it into a Metalsmith plugin.

Node module

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 we 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
  })
})

Result

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.

Bringing in Metalsmith

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
 * ...
 */ s.build(function (err) {
  if (err) throw err

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