Adding Algolia to Rails

August 07, 2019

Only twice in my career, I was amazed with how simple integrating with a third party library. Algolia has done an amazing job with their gem.

To get started run:

gem install algoliasearch-rails

I personal use dotenv gem to store my secrets. Add algolia app id and api key to .env file:

ALGOLIA_SEARCH_APP_ID=XXXXXXXXXX
ALGOLIA_SEARCH_API_KEY=XXXXXXXXX

Add the following file to config/initializers/algolia.rb.

# config/initializers/algolia.rb
AlgoliaSearch.configuration = {
  application_id: ENV['ALGOLIA_SEARCH_APP_ID'],
  api_key: ENV['ALGOLIA_SEARCH_API_KEY'],
  connect_timeout: 2,
  receive_timeout: 30,
  send_timeout: 30,
  batch_timeout: 120,
  search_timeout: 5
}

I personally am not a fan of sending all of your data to algolia, so recommend sending the attributes you need. To add algolia to your user model do the following:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  include AlgoliaSearch

  algoliasearch do
    attributes :id, :first_name, :last_name, :email
    searchableAttributes [:first_name, :last_name, :email]
  end
end

Run the following command in rails console to reindex all of your users in algolia.

User.reindex!

Run the following command to search: ruby User.algolia_search(‘kevin’)

If you have a lot of data, you will need paginate.
To do this you need to update `config/initializers/algolia.rb` to specify: `kaminari` or `will_paginate`

config/initializers/algolia.rb

pagination_backend: :kaminari,

OR

config/initializers/algolia.rb

paginationbackend: :willpaginate,

Now add pagination to your search, change your algolia search to include `hitsPerPage` and `page`.
```ruby
User.algolia_search('kevin', hitsPerPage: 2, page: 1)

There you go. A simple crash course on alogia. If you need more details about alogia rails gem check it out https://github.com/algolia/algoliasearch-rails

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