django-robots 3.0rc1

Installation

Use your favorite Python installer to install it from PyPI:

pip install django-robots

Or get the source from the application site at:

http://github.com/jazzband/django-robots/

To install the sitemap app, then follow these steps:

1. Add 'robots' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.

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

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

4. Run the syncdb or migrate management command (depening if you’re using South or not)

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.

Host directive

By default a Host statement is automatically added to the resulting robots.txt to avoid mirrors and select the main website properly.

To change the default behaviour to omit the inclusion of host directive, change the ROBOTS_USE_HOST setting in your Django settings file to:

ROBOTS_USE_HOST = False

if you want to prefix the domain with the current request protocol (http or https as in Host: https://www.mysite.com) add this setting:

ROBOTS_USE_SCHEME_IN_HOST = True

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).

Changelog

Bugs and feature requests

As always your mileage may vary, so please don’t hesitate to send feature requests and bug reports:

https://github.com/jazzband/django-robots/issues

Thanks!