docsearch.js

DocSearch

We've created the fastest, easiest way to search within documentation. Check out our website to add an outstanding search to your documentation.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Setup
• Customization
• Development workflow
  • Local example
  • Documentation website
  • MacOS

Introduction

We're scratching our own itch here. As developers, we spend a lot of time reading documentation, and it isn't always easy to find the information we need.

Not blaming anyone here. Building a good search for a documentation is a complex challenge. We happen to have a lot of experience doing that, and we want to share it with the world. For free.

Just submit the form on the website and we'll get back to you with what you need to integrate your new search into your website.

• We'll crawl your documentation pages,
• We'll configure your search experience,
• You'll need to add a bit of JavaScript and CSS code to your website.

Setup

Once we've crawled your documentation website we'll send you the credentials you need to add the following code snippet to your website:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="//cdn.jsdelivr.net/docsearch.js/0/docsearch.min.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="//cdn.jsdelivr.net/docsearch.js/0/docsearch.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
docSearch({
  apiKey: '<API_KEY>',
  indexName: '<INDEX_NAME>',
  inputSelector: '<YOUR_INPUT_DOM_SELECTOR>'
});
</script>

Customization

To customize the look & feel of the dropdown menu, you can either:

• edit the color variables and rebuild this project CSS (npm run build:css),
• or override the colors like we did in dev/docsearch-styling.css.

Development workflow

Local example

We use a simple documentation example website as a way to develop the docsearch.js library.

Requirements:

• Node.js
• npm@2

npm run dev
# open http://localhost:8080

Documentation website

This is the Jekyll instance running at https://community.algolia.com/docsearch.

Requirements:

• Ruby
• Bundler

npm run dev:docs
# open http://localhost:4000/docsearch/

MacOS

If you are using brew and you had brew install openssl, you may need to configure the build path of eventmachine with

bundle config build.eventmachine --with-cppflags=-I$(brew --prefix openssl)/include