Algolia Search is a hosted full-text, numerical, and faceted search engine capable of delivering realtime results from the first keystroke. The Algolia Search API Client for Ruby lets you easily use the Algolia Search REST API from your Ruby code.

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

You can find the full reference on Algolia's website.

1. Install

   • Ruby on Rails

2. Quick Start

   • Initialize the client
   • Push data
   • Search
   • Configure
   • Frontend search

3. Getting Help

Install AlgoliaSearch using:

gem install algoliasearch

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

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

You first need to initialize the client. For that you need your Application ID and API Key. You can find both of them on your Algolia account.

require 'rubygems'
require 'algoliasearch'

Algolia.init :application_id => "YourApplicationID",
             :api_key        => "YourAPIKey"

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

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

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

# search by firstname
puts index.search('jimmie').to_json
# search a firstname with typo
puts index.search('jimie').to_json
# search for a company
puts index.search('california paint').to_json
# search for a firstname & company
puts index.search('jimmie paint').to_json

Settings can be customized to tune the search behavior. For example, you can add a custom sort by number of followers to the already great built-in relevance:

index.set_settings({"customRanking" => ["desc(followers)"]})

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

Note: Since the engine is designed to suggest results as you type, you'll generally search by prefix. In this case the order of attributes is very important to decide which hit is the best:

index.set_settings({"searchableAttributes" => ["lastname", "firstname", "company",
                                            "email", "city", "address"]})

Note: If you are building a web application, you may be more interested in using our JavaScript client to perform queries.

It brings two benefits:

• Your users get a better response time by not going through your servers
• It will offload unnecessary tasks from your servers

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/algoliasearch/3/algoliasearch.min.js"></script>
<script>
var client = algoliasearch('ApplicationID', 'apiKey');
var index = client.initIndex('indexName');

// perform query "jim"
index.search('jim', searchCallback);

// the last optional argument can be used to add search parameters
index.search(
  'jim', {
    hitsPerPage: 5,
    facets: '*',
    maxValuesPerFacet: 10
  },
  searchCallback
);

function searchCallback(err, content) {
  if (err) {
    console.error(err);
    return;
  }

  console.log(content);
}
</script>

• Need help? Ask a question to the Algolia Community or on Stack Overflow.
• Found a bug? You can open a GitHub issue.