Getting started

Welcome to jekyll-algolia

jekyll-algolia is a Jekyll plugin that lets you push all your content in an Algolia index.

While this plugin was created by Algolia, it is not an officially supported API client. It is possible that future major versions of Jekyll break compatibility, or require changes.

Requirements

You’ll need:

• Jekyll >= 3.6.0
• Ruby >= 2.3.0
• Bundler

Installation

You need to add jekyll-algolia to your Gemfile, as part of the :jekyll-plugins group. If you do not yet have a Gemfile, here is the minimal content you’ll need:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'jekyll', '~> 3.6'

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem 'jekyll-algolia'
end

Then, run bundle install to update your dependencies.

If everything went well, you should be able to run jekyll help and see the algolia subcommand listed.

Configuration

You need to provide your Algolia credentials for this plugin to index your site.

If you don’t yet have an Algolia account, you can open a free Community plan here. Once signed in, you can get your credentials from your dashboard.

Once you have your credentials, you should define your application_id and index_name inside your _config.yml file like this:

# _config.yml

algolia:
  application_id: your_application_id
  index_name:     jekyll # You can replace that with whatever name you want

Usage

Once your credentials are setup, you can run the indexing by running the following command:

ALGOLIA_API_KEY='your_admin_api_key' bundle exec jekyll algolia

Note that ALGOLIA_API_KEY should be set to your admin API key. This key has write access to your index so will be able to push new data. This is also why you have to set it on the command line and not in the _config.yml file: you want to keep this key secret and not commit it to your versioning system.

Note that in the animation we simplified the method call to jekyll algolia by using an alternative way of loading the API key and using rubygems-bundler to remove the need to add bundle exec.

Front-end

The plugin only takes care of extracting your data and pushing it to an Algolia index. Building the front-end that will allow your users to search into that data is not part of the plugin.

As it would depend too much on the theme you applied to Jekyll, we could not create a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, the best solution is to use our InstantSearch.js library (also available for Vue.js, React and Angular). It’s an easy-to-use set of UI widgets you can use to build your own search in a matter of minutes.

You can follow this tutorial to see how to add search on the default blog theme.