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vite-plugin-seo-files

vite-plugin-seo-files is a Vite plugin that automates the generation of essential technical SEO files (sitemap.xml, robots.txt) after the build. It supports both ESM and CommonJS through dual exports.

It integrates easily into your Vite configuration and works with all frameworks (static HTML, React, Vue, Svelte…).

A practical way to improve indexing and crawling for your static sites or SPAs.

🚀 Installation

npm install vite-plugin-seo-files --save-dev

⚙️ Usage

Add the plugin in your vite.config.js or vite.config.mjs file:

import { defineConfig } from 'vite';
import seoFiles from 'vite-plugin-seo-files';

export default defineConfig({
    plugins: [
        seoFiles({
            siteUrl: 'https://example.com', // ✅ Required: base URL of your site
            generateSitemap: true,          // Optional: generate sitemap.xml (default: true)
            generateRobots: true,           // Optional: generate robots.txt (default: true)
            exclude: ['test.html', 'drafts/**'], // Optional: glob patterns to exclude from sitemap
            additionalUrls: ['/external-page', '/api/landing'], // Optional: extra URLs to manually include in sitemap
            disallow: ['/private/', '/secret.html'] // Optional: paths to disallow in robots.txt
        })
    ]
});

SPA Use Case (React, Vue, etc.)

For Single Page Application projects, you can add a routes-list.js file inside the src/ directory.
If this file is detected (src/routes-list.js), it will automatically be used to generate the sitemap based on the declared routes.
Otherwise, the plugin will fall back to scanning .html files in the dist/ directory.

Example file routes-list.js:

export default [
    '/',
    '/about'
];

🧾 Generated Files

After vite build, the plugin automatically writes to dist/:

| File | Description | |---------------|----------------------------------------------------| | sitemap.xml | List of HTML pages with lastmod, priority | | robots.txt | Access rules for search engine crawlers |

🔧 Available Options

| Option | Type | Default | Description | |-------------------|------------|-----------|------------------------------------------------------------------| | siteUrl | string | - | Base site URL used in sitemap.xml and robots.txt | | generateSitemap | boolean | true | Enable/disable sitemap generation | | generateRobots | boolean | true | Enable/disable robots.txt generation | | exclude | string[] | [] | List of glob patterns to exclude from the sitemap | | additionalUrls | string[] | [] | Custom URLs to manually include in the sitemap.xml | | disallow | string[] | [] | List of paths to disallow in robots.txt |

✨ Included Features

• Compatible with all Vite projects (SPA, MPA, static)
• Extracts real lastmod modification dates from .html files
• Automatic use of src/routes-list.js if present (for SPAs)
• Added custom URLs with additionalUrls
• Custom exclusion via exclude
• robots.txt disallow rules via disallow

📁 Examples

Structure

dist/
├── index.html
├── about/
├   └── index.html
├── offline.html
├── sitemap.xml # generated automatically
└── robots.txt # generated automatically

sitemap.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <url>
        <loc>https://browserux.com/offline.html</loc>
        <lastmod>2025-06-07</lastmod>
        <priority>0.50</priority>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>https://browserux.com/</loc>
        <lastmod>2025-06-07</lastmod>
        <priority>1.00</priority>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>https://browserux.com/about/</loc>
        <lastmod>2025-06-07</lastmod>
        <priority>0.50</priority>
    </url>
</urlset>

robots.txt

# https://www.robotstxt.org/

# Allow all crawlers full access
User-agent: *

# Prevent indexing of sensitive or non-public areas
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /secret.html

# Sitemap file
Sitemap: https://browserux.com/sitemap.xml

📌 Best Practices

• The siteUrl field must be an absolute URL (starting with https://)
• The plugin only runs during vite build, not during development
• Use exclude to ignore draft or error pages from the sitemap
• Use disallow to prevent indexing of specific paths in robots.txt

🧑‍💻 TypeScript & ESM Support

As of version 2.0.0, the plugin is now fully written in TypeScript and published as native ESM ("type": "module" in package.json).

If you're using vite.config.ts, you can now benefit from full typings automatically:

import seoFiles from 'vite-plugin-seo-files';

seoFiles({
  siteUrl: 'https://example.com'
});

⚖️ License

MIT © 2025 Effeilo