Tools / Crawler / Front-End Configuration

With the official Algolia plugin for Netlify, Algolia recommends to use this front-end bundle. It’s designed to be compatible with the index structure extracted by Algolia’s Netlify plugin. It creates a new search input on your site with an autocomplete menu, providing search as you type results.

Default front-end

Usage

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<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@algolia/algoliasearch-netlify-frontend@1/dist/algoliasearchNetlify.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@algolia/algoliasearch-netlify-frontend@1/dist/algoliasearchNetlify.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  algoliasearchNetlify({
    appId: '<YOUR_ALGOLIA_APP_ID>',
    apiKey: '<YOUR_ALGOLIA_API_KEY>',
    siteId: '<YOUR_NETLIFY_SITE_ID>',
    branch: '<YOUR_TARGET_GIT_BRANCH>',
    selector: 'div#search',
  });
</script>

Available options

Options

appId
type: string
Required

Application ID, can be found at https://www.algolia.com/account/api-keys/

apiKey
type: string
Required

API Key, can be found at https://www.algolia.com/account/api-keys/

siteId
type: string
Required

Netlify Site ID, can be found at https://crawler.algolia.com/admin/netlify

branch
type: string
Required

Target git branch, Either a fixed one, for example ‘main’, or a dynamic one using process.env.HEAD. You can also use multiple target branches.

selector
type: string
default: div#search
Required

The element that the autocomplete will replace. This shouldn’t be an input.

analytics
type: boolean
default: true
Optional

Whether to enable search analytics.

hitsPerPage
type: number
default: 5
Optional

The number of results to display.

placeholder
type: string
default: Search...
Optional

The input placeholder.

openOnFocus
type: boolean
default: true
Optional

Whether to open the search panel with a default search, when focusing on the input.

detached
type: string
default: { mediaQuery: '(max-width: 500px)' }
Optional

Decide when the search popup should open in detached mode (full screen, modal experience). Can be set to true or false to always/never go in detached mode.

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{
  detached: { mediaQuery: '(max-width: 500px)' },
  detached: false,
}
theme
type: object
Optional

Change the visual aspect of the autocomplete.

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theme: {
  mark: '#fff',                                 // Color of the matching content
  background: '#23263b',                        // Background Color of the input and the panel
  selected: '#111432',                          // Background Color of the selected item
  text: '#d6d6e7',                              // Color of the title of the items
  colorSourceIcon: '#d6d6e7'                    // Color of the icon on the left of results
}

Using multiple branches

If you’ve set up the plugin to index multiple branches using the branches option, each configured branch has a dedicated index. You also need to pass the information of which index you want to search in using the branch parameter of the integration.

To get access to the currently building branch, you can configure your build tool to forward the HEAD environment variable. For instance, with webpack’s environment plugin configured to forward HEAD, you would pass branch: process.env.HEAD.

If you’ve configured your plugin to index only specific branches, you need to duplicate the logic here so that it picks the correct branch only when appropriate. For instance, with branches = ['main', 'develop', 'feat/*'], and using webpack’s environment plugin to inject HEAD, here’s how the snippet could look like:

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const currentBranch = process.env.HEAD; // Injected by your build tool
let targetBranch = 'main';
if (currentBranch === 'develop' || currentBranch.startsWith('feat/')) {
  targetBranch = currentBranch;
}
algoliasearchNetlify({
  // ...
  branch: targetBranch,
});

Theme

You can theme the input and the autocomplete by using the theme property.

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// Example of dark theme:
{
  theme: {
    mark: '#fff',
    background: '#23263b',
    selected: '#111432',
    text: '#d6d6e7',
    colorSourceIcon: '#d6d6e7'
  }
}

Front-end with dark-mode

To go further you should take a look at the autocomplete.js documentation, or implement your own search with InstantSearch.js.

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