sphinx-sitemap

What it is and what it does

sphinx-sitemap is a Sphinx extension that automatically generates XML sitemaps compatible with the sitemaps.org protocol for your HTML documentation builds. It handles the common case where documentation exists in multiple versions or languages, creating a single sitemap that search engines can use to discover and index all variants of your docs.

The package integrates directly into Sphinx's build process and requires minimal configuration—typically just setting your documentation's base URL. It depends on sphinx-last-updated-by-git to track when content was last modified, which feeds into sitemap metadata. The extension is permissively licensed under MIT and has been maintained since 2017.

Use it for:

• Generate search-engine-discoverable sitemaps for multi-version documentation (e.g., docs for current and legacy releases)
• Create sitemaps for documentation available in multiple languages to ensure all variants are indexed
• Automatically include lastmod timestamps in sitemaps by tracking git commit history of documentation files
• Improve SEO for Sphinx-hosted documentation by providing structured sitemap metadata to search engines

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Generates sitemaps.org-compliant XML sitemaps for Sphinx documentation, supporting multiple versions and languages in a single output.

Yes. This is a lightweight, actively maintained Sphinx extension with no known vulnerabilities, permissive licensing, and a single runtime dependency. Install it if you host Sphinx documentation and want search engines to reliably discover all versions or language variants of your docs.

Install

sphinx-sitemap on PyPI

pip install sphinx-sitemap

uv add sphinx-sitemap

poetry add sphinx-sitemap

Installing sphinx-sitemap

Before you install

Low install friction with a single runtime dependency. Active maintenance as of August 2026, with consistent releases since 2017.

License in practice

MIT license permits unrestricted use, modification, and distribution in both open-source and proprietary projects.

Quickstart

pip install sphinx-sitemap

# In conf.py, add to extensions list:
extensions = ['sphinx_sitemap']

# Configure sitemap URL:
html_baseurl = 'https://example.com/docs/'

Verify before relying

• Whether the package handles dynamic content or requires static HTML generation first
• Performance characteristics with very large documentation sets or many language variants

Package facts

Evidence: sphinx_sitemap-2.9.0-py3-none-any.whl

Tags

More Sphinx packages