Tutorials / Getting started / Quick start with the Ruby API client
Jun. 03, 2019

Quick Start with the Ruby API Client

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Install

Install the Ruby client using RubyGems:

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$

gem install algoliasearch

Ruby on Rails

If you’re a Ruby on Rails user, you’re probably looking for the algoliasearch-rails gem.

Quick Start

In 30 seconds, this quick start tutorial will show you how to index and search objects.

Initialize the client

To start, you need to initialize the client. To do this, you need your Application ID and API Key. You can find both on your Algolia account.

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require 'rubygems'
require 'algoliasearch'

Algolia.init(application_id: 'YourApplicationID',
             api_key:        'YourAdminAPIKey')
index = Algolia::Index.new('your_index_name')

The API key displayed here is your Admin API key. To maintain security, never use your Admin API key on your front end, nor share it with anyone. In your front end, use the search-only API key or any other key that has search-only rights.

Push data

Without any prior configuration, you can start indexing 500 contacts in the contacts index using the following code:

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index = Algolia::Index.new('contacts')
batch = JSON.parse(File.read('contacts.json'))
index.add_objects(batch)

Configure

You can customize settings to fine tune the search behavior. For example, you can add a custom ranking by number of followers to further enhance the built-in relevance:

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index.set_settings(customRanking: ['desc(followers)'])

You can also configure the list of attributes you want to index by order of importance (most important first).

Algolia is designed to suggest results as you type, which means you’ll generally search by prefix. In this case, the order of attributes is crucial to decide which hit is the best.

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index.set_settings({
  searchableAttributes: [
    'lastname',
    'firstname',
    'company',
    'email',
    'city',
    'address'
  ]}
)

You can now search for contacts by firstname, lastname, company, etc. (even with typos):

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# Search for a first name
puts index.search('jimmie').to_json
# Search for a first name with typo
puts index.search('jimie').to_json
# Search for a company
puts index.search('california paint').to_json
# Search for a first name and a company
puts index.search('jimmie paint').to_json

Search UI

If you’re building a web application, you may be interested in using one of our front-end search UI libraries.

The following example shows how to quickly build a front-end search using InstantSearch.js

index.html

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<!doctype html>
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/instantsearch.css@7.3.1/themes/algolia-min.css" integrity="sha256-HB49n/BZjuqiCtQQf49OdZn63XuKFaxcIHWf0HNKte8=" crossorigin="anonymous">
</head>
<body>
  <header>
    <div id="search-box"></div>
  </header>

  <main>
      <div id="hits"></div>
      <div id="pagination"></div>
  </main>

  <script type="text/html" id="hit-template">
    <div class="hit">
      <p class="hit-name">
        {{#helpers.highlight}}{ "attribute": "firstname" }{{/helpers.highlight}}
        {{#helpers.highlight}}{ "attribute": "lastname" }{{/helpers.highlight}}
      </p>
    </div>
  </script>

  <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/algoliasearch@3.33.0/dist/algoliasearchLite.min.js" integrity="sha256-3Laj91VXexjTlFLgL8+vvIq27laXdRmFIcO2miulgEs=" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
  <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/instantsearch.js@3.4.0/dist/instantsearch.production.min.js" integrity="sha256-pM0n88cBFRHpSn0N26ETsQdwpA7WAXJDvkHeCLh3ujI=" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
  <script src="app.js"></script>
</body>

app.js

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// Replace with your own values
const searchClient = algoliasearch(
  'YourApplicationID',
  'YourSearchOnlyAPIKey' // search only API key, not admin API key
);

const search = instantsearch({
  indexName: 'contacts',
  searchClient,
  routing: true,
});

search.addWidget(
  instantsearch.widgets.configure({
    hitsPerPage: 10,
  })
);

search.addWidget(
  instantsearch.widgets.searchBox({
    container: '#search-box',
    placeholder: 'Search for contacts',
  })
);

search.addWidget(
  instantsearch.widgets.hits({
    container: '#hits',
    templates: {
      item: document.getElementById('hit-template').innerHTML,
      empty: `We didn't find any results for the search <em>"{{query}}"</em>`,
    },
  })
);

search.start();

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