Search Services

Algolia Search

NexT provides Algolia search plugin to search your Hexo website content. It should be noted that only turn on enable of algolia_search in NexT config file does not allow you to use the Algolia search correctly. You need to install the corresponding Hexo plugin to index your website on Algolia: Hexo Algolia or Hexo Algoliasearch.

Known Issues

The latest version of the Hexo Algolia plugin removes the content indexing feature, given Algolia's free account limitation.
The Hexo Algoliasearch plugin provides content indexing functionality. The same problem exists with Record Too Big for Algolia's free account.

Follow the steps described below to complete the installation of Algolia search.

Register at Algolia, you can log in directly using GitHub or Google Account. Upon Customer's initial sign-up for an Account, Customer will have a free, fourteen (14) day evaluation period (the «Evaluation Period») for the Algolia Services commencing on the Effective Date, subject to the limitations on Algolia's website. After that, Algolia offers a free, branded version for up to 10k records and 100k operations per month.

If a tutorial pops up, you can skip it. Go straight to create an Index which will be used later.

Go to the API Keys page and find your credentials. You will need the Application ID and the Search-only API key in the following sections. The Admin API key need to keep confidential. Never store your Admin API Key as apiKey in Hexo config file: it would give full control of your Algolia index to others and you don't want to face the consequences.
In the API Keys page, click the All API Keys button to switch to the corresponding tab. Then click the New API Key button to activate a pop-up box where you can setup authorizations and restrictions with a great level of precision. Enter addObject, deleteObject, listIndexes, deleteIndex features in ACL permissions that will be allowed for the given API key. And then click the Create button. Copy this newly created key to the clipboard, we call it a High-privilege API key.

Algolia requires users to upload their search index data either manually or via provided APIs. You need to choose one of the following two plugins to install. Both plugins will index your site and upload selected data to Algolia.

Hexo Algolia
Hexo Algoliasearch

Install and configure Hexo Algolia in your Hexo directory.

cd hexo-site
npm install hexo-algolia

In your Hexo config file, add the following configuration and replace the Application ID, Search-only API key and indexName with corresponding fields obtained at Algolia.

Hexo config file

algolia:
  applicationID: "Application ID"
  apiKey: "Search-only API key"
  indexName: "indexName"

Run the following command to upload index data, keep a weather eye out the output of the command.

export HEXO_ALGOLIA_INDEXING_KEY=High-privilege API key # Use Git Bash
# set HEXO_ALGOLIA_INDEXING_KEY=High-privilege API key # Use Windows command line
hexo clean
hexo algolia

Reload Index

Install and configure Hexo Algoliasearch in your Hexo directory.

cd hexo-site
npm install hexo-algoliasearch

In your Hexo config file, add the following configuration and replace the Application ID, Search-only API key, High-privilege API key and indexName with corresponding fields obtained at Algolia.

Hexo config file

algolia:
  appId: "Application ID"
  apiKey: "Search-only API key"
  adminApiKey: "High-privilege API key"
  indexName: "indexName"
  chunkSize: 5000
  fields:
    - content:strip:truncate,0,500
    - excerpt:strip
    - gallery
    - permalink
    - photos
    - slug
    - tags
    - title

Run the following command to upload index data, keep a weather eye out the output of the command.

hexo clean
hexo algolia

In NexT config file, turn on enable of algolia_search. At the same time, you need to turn off other search plugins like Local Search. You can also adjust the text in labels according to your needs.

NexT config file

# Algolia Search
algolia_search:
  enable: true
  hits:
    per_page: 10

Local Search

Local search does not require any external 3rd-party services and can be extra indexed by search engines. This search method is recommended for most users.

Install hexo-generator-searchdb by executing the following command in site root dir:

npm install hexo-generator-searchdb

Edit Hexo config file and add following content:

Hexo config file

search:
  path: search.xml
  field: post
  content: true
  format: html

Edit NexT config file to enable Local Search:

NexT config file

# Local search
# Dependencies: https://github.com/next-theme/hexo-generator-searchdb
local_search:
  enable: true
  # Show top n results per article, show all results by setting to -1
  top_n_per_article: 1
  # Unescape html strings to the readable one.
  unescape: false
  # Preload the search data when the page loads.
  preload: false