Adding a sitemap to a Laravel application

Lets say, you have a route corresponding controller method for generating sitemap.

Inside your controller you can just create the xml file structure:

$sitemapHeader  = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>'."\n";
		$sitemapHeader .= '<urlset ';
		$sitemapHeader .= 'xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" ';
		$sitemapHeader .= 'xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" ';
		$sitemapHeader .= 'xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 ';
		$sitemapHeader .= 'http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"';
		$sitemapHeader .= '>';

This would be the header.

Now inside you have to put your urls wrapped in

<url>
<loc>http://www.mywebsite.com/</loc>
</url>

This is the bare minimum info. You can include more information like last modified, priority etc

<lastmod>2016-12-05</lastmod>
<priority>0.5</priority>

Now you may use your Laravel model to generate dynamic URLs.

$articles = Article::all();
foreach ($articles as $article) {
$title = $article -> slug;
$str = '<url>'."\n";
$str .= '<loc>';
$str .= 'http://www.mywebsite.com/article/'.$title;
$str .= '</loc>'."\n";
$str .= '</url>'."\n";
$sitemap .= $str;
}

Now add the header and footer to the set of URLs.

$sitemapFooter ='</urlset>';
$sitemap = $sitemapHeader.$sitemap;
$sitemap = $sitemap.$sitemapFooter;

This can be written to a file in a desired location.

//Write Sitemap to file
$filename = 'sitemap.xml';
file_put_contents($filename, $sitemap);