Integrating and Synchronizing Algolia with Strapi (v4)

In today’s fast-paced digital world, providing efficient search functionality is crucial for delivering a seamless user experience. Algolia, a powerful search and discovery API, offers developers a way to implement robust search capabilities into their applications. In this blog post, we will explore how to integrate and synchronize Algolia with Strapi (v4) to enhance search functionality for a “Product” collection

Setting Up Algolia and Strapi Integration:

To begin, we need to set up Algolia and Strapi integration. We assume you already have a Strapi project and have installed Algolia. Now, let’s create a helper function that will initialize the Algolia index.

const algoliasearch = require("algoliasearch");

const client = algoliasearch(
  process.env.ALGOLIA_APP_ID,
  process.env.ALGOLIA_API_KEY
);

const getAlgoliaIndex = (name) => {
  const index = client.initIndex(`${name}(${process.env.NODE_ENV})`);
  return index;
};

module.exports = getAlgoliaIndex;

This code sets up the Algolia client using your Algolia app ID and API key. The getAlgoliaIndex function initializes the index with the provided name and environment variables. Note that we have also used the current environment with the index name to differ between the indices of different environments.

Synchronizing Strapi Product Collection with Algolia:

Now, let’s proceed to add and synchronize the “Product” collection in Strapi with Algolia. We will utilize Strapi’s lifecycle hooks to achieve this. Specifically, we will use the afterCreate lifecycle method.

Navigate to the product content type in your Strapi project and locate the lifecycles.js file. If it doesn’t exist, create one in the same directory. Add the following code to the lifecycles.js file:

const getAlgoliaIndex = require("./path/to/getAlgoliaIndex");

const index = getAlgoliaIndex("product");

module.exports = {
  async afterCreate(entry, data) {
    const { id } = data.result;
      // Query product added to database
    const product = await        strapi.db.query('api::product.product').findOne({
    where: {
      id
     }
   })

    try {
      // Save the object to Algolia
      await index.saveObject({ ObjectID: id , ...product });
      console.log("Object saved to Algolia");
    } catch (error) {
      console.error("Error saving object to Algolia", error);
    }
  },
};

In this code snippet we import the getAlgoliaIndex function we created and then initialize the Algolia index by calling the function and passing a name for the index.

In the afterCreate lifecycle method we query the data which is added to the database.

Finally we use index.saveObject method to save the new entry to Algolia. We wrap this operation in a try-catch block to handle any potential errors.

Conclusion:

By integrating and synchronizing Algolia with Strapi, we have empowered our application with advanced search capabilities. Leveraging Algolia’s powerful search API, we can deliver fast and relevant search results to our users. This integration enables real-time updates to the Algolia index whenever a new product is created in Strapi. Implementing Algolia within Strapi not only enhances search functionality but also provides a scalable solution for managing search operations in your application.