Migrating sitemap storage

Frontastic has a built-in mechanism to generate and serve sitemaps. This mechanism is typically triggered on a nightly basis on all servers of a customer. When scaling up, the latest deployed server image is used to create new servers. If your latest deployment took place a long time ago, the sitemap served from this new server will be outdated.

While this issue rarely happens, we've fixed it on an architectural level. Because the sitemap setup differs a lot between projects, you'll now need to manually activate the new storage mechanism in your project. To do that, edit the environment file in your project directory and add the below line:

database_sitemaps=1

Once this change is deployed to your production servers, sitemaps will automatically be migrated to the new mechanism on the next generation cycle.

To use the new mechanism and migration before the next generation cycle, you can follow the steps below:

  1. Create a Frontastic sandbox with public DNS
  2. (Don't start Frontastic CLI!)
  3. SSH into the sandbox
  4. cd into your project directory
  5. Execute the sitemap generation as you have it in your projects config/crontab file
  6. Ensure the sitemaps are properly generated into public/…
  7. Use an HTTP client to fetch the sitemap from your public DNS host
  8. Repeat the command execution but prefix is with database_sitemaps=1 (mind the space between the prefix variable and the command)
  9. Ensure the previously generated sitemaps are removed from public/…
  10. Repeat the HTTP request to ensure the sitemap is still served correctly

If you generate multiple sitemaps using multiple command executions, test each command according to this procedure.