Algolia's Ecosystem

Overview

To ease the integration of Algolia, we built a set of libraries to help you implement Algolia on your website or application.

REST API

The entirety of the Algolia ecosystem is built on top of the REST API. While it allows you to accomplish everything search and indexing related, we highly recommend leveraging one of our API clients instead.

You should only utilize our REST API to develop new API clients. Targeting the REST API without an API client cancels our provided SLA terms.

Indexing & Configuration

Dashboard

The dashboard allows you to:

• manage your subscription to the Algolia service and related options
• configure your team members’ access rights
• see analytics data
• manage indices and API keys

Index and key management can also be done programmatically via our API clients.

API Clients

We’ve developed API clients for the most common programming languages and platforms. These clients are advanced wrappers on top of our REST API itself and have been built in order to help you integrate our service within your apps. Each client provides various methods for communicating with Algolia’s API related to both indexing and search. For example, you might choose to use our Ruby client for your indexing logic, while your front-end relies on our Javascript client. All our clients are open-source and available on Github.

Our clients include a retry strategy to ensure you are always able to reach Algolia’s servers.

Framework Integrations

Built on top of our API Clients, framework integrations hook into framework ORMs to help take care of data synchronization out of the box. For most use-cases, leveraging one of these integrations is the recommended option if you’re already using the respective framework.

Extensions

Additionally, we have developed a few extensions that help you implement Algolia in the matter of minutes.

If you are using one of these products, the appropriate extension will most likely be the path of least resistance for adding Algolia to your website. The extension will handle all of the indexing and synchronization, and also provide a solid front-end user experience out of the box.

As of today, we have four official extensions.

On top of that, we also have extensions that are maintained by the community:

• Zendesk
• Jekyll

Building a Search User Interface

We’ve created several different libraries that leverage the API clients to provide even higher-level concepts and interactions to the developers. In particular, these libraries help shorten the development time necessary for creating a search user interface. For a deeper dive into the capabilities of these libraries, see our search libraries.

InstantSearch

The InstantSearch library provides an extensive library of widgets to power your search and build a state-of-the-art instant-search experience. All of the best practices we have learned while implementing search on hundreds of websites are packed into our widgets. InstantSearch is also available in React, VueJS, iOS, and Android flavors.

autocomplete.js

The autocomplete.js library adds a fast and fully-featured auto-completion menu to your search box displaying results “as you type”.

Tools

For certain specific use cases, we have built products to handle indexing tasks such as data synchronization, configuration, and maintenance.

The only work necessary on your end is to add a small JavaScript snippet to your website or application.

DocSearch

DocSearch is the easiest way to add search to technical documentation.

To get started, fill out the form on the DocSearch website and we’ll respond with the code snippet necessary to integrate your new search into your website. Not only do we handle crawling your documentation pages, we configure and maintain your search experience for you.

Docsearch is provided for free and does not require creating an Algolia account.

TalkSearch

TalkSearch provides interactive search experiences for video titles and transcripts, made for conferences and meetups.

Places

Places is an easy-to-use address autocompletion that has been designed to improve the user experience of your forms. It harnesses OpenStreetMap’s impressive open source database of worldwide places.