django-robots 0.8.0

Robots exclusion application for Django, complementing Sitemaps.

This is a basic Django application to manage robots.txt files following the robots exclusion protocol, complementing the Django Sitemap contrib app.

The robots exclusion application consists of two database models which are tied together with a m2m relationship:

• Rules

• URLs

Installation

Get the source from the application site at:

http://bitbucket.org/jezdez/django-robots/

To install the sitemap app, follow these steps:

1. Follow the instructions in the INSTALL.txt file

2. Add 'robots' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.

3. Make sure 'django.template.loaders.app_directories.load_template_source' is in your TEMPLATE_LOADERS setting. It’s in there by default, so you’ll only need to change this if you’ve changed that setting.

4. Make sure you’ve installed the sites framework.

Sitemaps

By default a Sitemap statement is automatically added to the resulting robots.txt by reverse matching the URL of the installed Sitemap contrib app. This is especially useful if you allow every robot to access your whole site, since it then gets URLs explicitly instead of searching every link.

To change the default behaviour to omit the inclusion of a sitemap link, change the ROBOTS_USE_SITEMAP setting in your Django settings file to:

ROBOTS_USE_SITEMAP = False

In case you want to use specific sitemap URLs instead of the one that is automatically discovered, change the ROBOTS_SITEMAP_URLS setting to:

ROBOTS_SITEMAP_URLS = [
    http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml,
]

Initialization

To activate robots.txt generation on your Django site, add this line to your URLconf:

(r'^robots.txt$', include('robots.urls')),

This tells Django to build a robots.txt when a robot accesses /robots.txt. Then, please sync your database to create the necessary tables and create Rule objects in the admin interface or via the shell.

Rules

Rule - defines an abstract rule which is used to respond to crawling web robots, using the robots exclusion protocol, a.k.a. robots.txt.

You can link multiple URL pattern to allows or disallows the robot identified by its user agent to access the given URLs.

The crawl delay field is supported by some search engines and defines the delay between successive crawler accesses in seconds. If the crawler rate is a problem for your server, you can set the delay up to 5 or 10 or a comfortable value for your server, but it’s suggested to start with small values (0.5-1), and increase as needed to an acceptable value for your server. Larger delay values add more delay between successive crawl accesses and decrease the maximum crawl rate to your web server.

The sites framework is used to enable multiple robots.txt per Django instance. If no rule exists it automatically allows every web robot access to every URL.

Please have a look at the database of web robots for a full list of existing web robots user agent strings.

URLs

Url - defines a case-sensitive and exact URL pattern which is used to allow or disallow the access for web robots. Case-sensitive.

A missing trailing slash does also match files which start with the name of the given pattern, e.g., '/admin' matches /admin.html too.

Some major search engines allow an asterisk (*) as a wildcard to match any sequence of characters and a dollar sign ($) to match the end of the URL, e.g., '/*.jpg$' can be used to match all jpeg files.

Caching

You can optionally cache the generation of the robots.txt. Add or change the ROBOTS_CACHE_TIMEOUT setting with a value in seconds in your Django settings file:

ROBOTS_CACHE_TIMEOUT = 60*60*24

This tells Django to cache the robots.txt for 24 hours (86400 seconds). The default value is None (no caching).

Support

Please leave your questions and problems on the designated Bitbucket site.