Algolia Jekyll Plugin

Jekyll plugin to automatically index your Jekyll posts and pages into an Algolia index by simply running jekyll algolia push.

Usage

$ jekyll algolia push

This will push the content of your jekyll website to your Algolia index.

You can specify any option you would normally pass to jekyll build, like --config, --source, --destination, etc.

Installation

First, add the algoliasearch-jekyll gem to your Gemfile, in the :jekyll_plugins section. If you do not yet have a Gemfile, here is the minimum content to get your started.

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'jekyll', '>=2.5.3'

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem 'algoliasearch-jekyll'
end

Once this is done, download all dependencies with bundle install.

Then, add algoliasearch-jekyll to your _config.yml file, under the gems section, like this:

gems:
  - algoliasearch-jekyll

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

Configuration

Add information about your Algolia configuration into the _config.yml file, under the algolia section, like this:

algolia:
  application_id: 'your_application_id'
  index_name:     'your_index_name'

You admin api key will be read from the ALGOLIA_API_KEY environment variable. You can define it on the same line as your command, allowing you to type ALGOLIA_API_KEY='your_admin_api_key' jekyll algolia push.

⚠ Other, unsecure, method ⚠

You can also store your admin api key in a file named _algolia_api_key, in your source directory. If you do this we very, very, very strongly encourage you to make sure the file is not tracked in your versioning system.

Options

The plugin uses sensible defaults, but you may want to override some of its configuration. Here are the various options you can add to your _config.yml file, under the algolia section:

excluded_files

Defines which files should not be indexed for search.

algolia:
  excluded_files:
    - index.html
    - 2015-01-01-post.md

record_css_selector

Defines the css selector inside a page/post used to choose which parts to index. It is set to all paragraphs (<p>) by default.

If you would like to also index lists, you could set it like this:

algolia:
  record_css_selector: 'p,ul'

settings

Here you can pass any custom settings you would like to push to your Algolia index.

If you want to activate distinct and some snippets for example, you would do:

algolia:
  settings:
    attributeForDistinct: 'hierarchy'
    distinct: true
    attributesToSnippet: ['text:20']

Hooks

The AlgoliaSearchRecordExtractor contains two methods (custom_hook_each and custom_hook_all) that are here so you can overwrite them to add your custom logic. They currently simply return the argument they take as input.

class AlgoliaSearchRecordExtractor
  # Hook to modify a record after extracting
  # `node` refers to the Nokogiri HTML node of the element
  def custom_hook_each(item, node)
    item
  end

  # Hook to modify all records after extracting
  def custom_hook_all(items)
    items
  end
end

Command line

Here is the list of command line options you can pass to the jekyll algolia push command:

Flag	Description
--config ./_config.yml	You can here specify the config file to use. Default is _config.yml
--future	With this flag, the command will also index posts with a future date
--limit_posts 10	Limits the number of posts to parse and index
--drafts	Index drafts in the _drafts folder as well
--dry-run or -n	Do a dry run, do not actually push anything to your index
--verbose	Display more information about what is going to be indexed

Dependencies

The algoliasearch-jekyll plugin works for versions of Jekyll starting from 2.5, with a version of Ruby of at least 2.0. You also need Bundler to easily add the gem as a dependency to Jekyll.

Searching

This plugin will only index your data in your Algolia index. Adding search capabilities is quite easy. You can follow our tutorials or use our forked version of the popular Hyde theme.

GitHub Pages

Unfortunatly, GitHub does not allow custom plugins to be run on GitHub Pages. This mean that you will have to manually run jekyll algolia push before pushing your content to GitHub.