Partially broken Algolia search

[pihaland]

Hi! I'm trying to add Algolia search to my Docusaurus app. Since my website is behind authentication, I’ve written a scraping script to send my content to Algolia. It works, and the structure of my index items is:

{
objectID : "http://localhost:3000/parameters/index.html"
headers: [ "Parameters"],
content: "Lorem ipsum"
title: "Parameters"
url: "http://localhost:3000/parameters/index.html"
language : "en"
type: "content"
hierarchy: {
                 lvl0: "Documentation"
                 lvl1: "Parameters"
               }
docusaurus_tag: "docs-default-current"
version: "current"
}

docusaurus.config.ts.txt

For the cs locale, it will be the same, but the objectID and url will be http://localhost:3000/cs/parameters/index.html and language: "cs"

Problems 🐛 :

1. Although I have docusaurus_tag: "docs-default-current", version: "current" and language : "en"

Turning on contextualSearch option in Docusaurus config leads that the filter filtered out all results, why? Tbh I have no idea how to debug it.

2 Ok, let's turn off contextualSearch. Now we will see results for both locales

However, on the local setup, although the links are absolutely correct, clicking on a search result from a different locale than the current one leads to strange behavior:

When going from EN --> CS, you are redirected to the correct page (the URL is actually correct), but the page is treated as a 404. However, after refreshing the page, it loads as expected. If I manually paste the link (from the Algolia search structure) into the browser, the page loads without any issues. So I don't understand where this strange behavior is coming from.

When going from CS --> EN, clicking on an English search result redirects you to the correct page, but still under the Czech locale. This is even more confusing to me. I can clearly see that the URL stored in Algolia is "http://localhost:3000/parameters/index.html", so why does it stay in the CS locale? Why the url from Algolia is ignored? How to solve it?

I'm using the standard built-in Algolia integration.
Feel free to ask if you need any additional information, I’d really appreciate your help 🙏

[slorber]

contextualSearch: true: you should get result. If your queries do not retrieve anything, I suggest contacting the DocSearch team to help you troubleshoot things and be sure your index is properly created.

We don't use the same setup as you do, so it's hard for us to help you, but there are interfaces you can use on the Algolia dashboard to check if you can filter on certain fields like language, version or docusaurus_tag.

---

contextualSearch: false

Not particularly recommended since you see results from all locales and all docs versions (leading to possible duplicates). If you disable this, then you are responsible for providing your own search queries to improve that UX.

By default, the Docusaurus search integration tries to navigate to your search hits using the SPA / soft navigation (based on history.pushState(), not window.location.href.

I18n sites are distinct SPA apps, and you can't navigate from one localized site to another using that kind of soft navigation, because one localized site is not aware (in terms of client-side routing) of routes of another i18n site. When navigating from one site to another, you should use a real browser navigation instead (using a regular <a> link or window.location.href). That's why you get a 404.

You can probably fix this by using the externalUrlRegex param, to force a non-SPA navigation on some search hits: https://docusaurus.io/docs/search#connecting-algolia

But really, it would be smpler to make contextual search work in the first place

[pihaland]

contextualSearch: true : Thank you for your answer and suggestion, I have found out that it isn't enough to have correctly set docusaurus_tag, version and language. It is also required to set them as attributes for faceting

I did this using API in this way (JS, algoliasearch v5 (5.35.0))

const client = algoliasearch(ALGOLIA_APP_ID, ALGOLIA_ADMIN_API_KEY);

await client.setSettings({
    indexName: ALGOLIA_INDEX_NAME,
    indexSettings: {
        attributesForFaceting: [
            'filterOnly(language)',
            'filterOnly(docusaurus_tag)',
            'filterOnly(content)',
        ],
    },
});

or you can set it using UI

Hope this will be useful as a troubleshooting for others in the Docusaurus community

[slorber]

If you use our recommended crawler config, your index should already have the correct facetting attributes initialized properly. If you initially created your index through a different crawler config, the attributes have to be added manually. The crawler config initializes the index config.

This is a common error and covered in our troubleshooting docs: https://docusaurus.io/docs/search#algolia-no-search-results