docsearch/docs/src/config-file.md

layout	title
two-columns	Config Files

For each DocSearch request we receive, we'll create a custom JSON config file that will define how the crawler should behave. You can find all the configs in this repository.

A DocSearch looks like this:

{
  "index_name": "example",
  "start_urls": ["https://www.example.com/docs"],
  "selectors": {
    "lvl0": "#content header h1",
    "lvl1": "#content article h1",
    "lvl2": "#content section h3",
    "lvl3": "#content section h4",
    "lvl4": "#content section h5",
    "lvl5": "#content section h6",
    "text": "#content header p,#content section p,#content section ol"
  }
}

index_name

This is the name of the Algolia index where your records will be pushed. The apiKey we will share with you will be restricted to work on this index.

When using the free DocSearch crawler, the indexName will always be the name of the config. If you're running DocSearch yourself, you can use any name you'd like.

{
  "index_name": "example"
}

start_urls

This array contains the list of URLs that will be used to start crawling your website. The crawler will recursively follow any links on those pages. It will not follow links that are on another domain and never follow links defined in stop_urls.

{
  "start_urls": ["https://www.example.com/docs"]
}

selectors_key, tailor your selectors

You can define finer sets of selectors depending on the URL. This is done thanks to the parameter selectors_key from your start_urls item.

{
  "start_urls": [
    {
      "url": "http://www.example.com/docs/faq/",
      "selectors_key": "faq"
    },
    {
      "url": "http://www.example.com/docs/"
    }
  ],
  […],
  "selectors": {
    "default": {
      "lvl0": ".docs h1",
      "lvl1": ".docs h2",
      "lvl2": ".docs h3",
      "lvl3": ".docs h4",
      "lvl4": ".docs h5",
      "text": ".docs p, .docs li"
    },
    "faq": {
      "lvl0": ".faq h1",
      "lvl1": ".faq h2",
      "lvl2": ".faq h3",
      "lvl3": ".faq h4",
      "lvl4": ".faq h5",
      "text": ".faq p, .faq li"
    }
  }
}

To find the right subset to use based on the URL, we iterate over these start_urls items. The first one matching is applied.

Considering the URL http://www.example.com/en/api/ with the configuration:

{
  "start_urls": [
    {
      "url": "http://www.example.com/doc/",
      "selectors_key": "doc"
    },
    {
      "url": "http://www.example.com/doc/faq/",
      "selectors_key": "faq"
    },
   […],
  ]
}

Only the set of selector related to doc will be applied to the URL. The correct configuration should be build the other way around (as primarily described).

If one start_urls item has no selectors_key defined, the default set will be used. Do not forget to precise this fallback.

Using regular expressions

The start_urls option also allows for passing an object in place of a string, to express more complex patterns. This object must contain a url key containing the regular expression matching the url, as well as a variables key that will be used to replace the named matches.

The following example will make it clearer:

{
  "start_urls": [
    {
      "url": "http://www.example.com/docs/(?P<lang>.*?)/(?P<version>.*?)/",
      "variables": {
        "lang": ["en", "fr"],
        "version": ["latest", "3.3", "3.2"]
      }
    }
  ]
}

The beneficial side effect of using this syntax is that all records that will then be extracted from crawling http://www.example.com/docs/en/latest will have lang: en and version: latest added to it, allowing you to then filter based on those values.

The following example shows how you can filter results matching specifics language and version from the frontend

docsearch({
  […],
  algoliaOptions: {
    'facetFilters': ["lang:en", "version:latest"]
  },
  […],
});

Using custom tags

You can also apply custom tags to some pages without the need to use regular expressions. In that case, add the list of tags to the tags key. Note that those tags will be automatically added as facets in Algolia, allowing you to filter based on their values as well.

{
  "start_urls": [
    {
      "url": "http://www.example.com/docs/concepts/",
      "tags": ["concepts", "terminology"]
    }
  ]
}

From your JS snippet:

docsearch({
  […],
  algoliaOptions: {
    'facetFilters': ["tags:concepts"]
  },
});

Using Page Rank

To give more weight to some pages to boost their ranking in the results, you can attribute a custom page_rank to specific URLs. Pages with highest page_rank will be returned before pages with a lower page_rank. Note that you can pass any numeric value, including negative values.

{
  "start_urls": [
    {
      "url": "http://www.example.com/docs/concepts/",
      "page_rank": 5
    },
    {
      "url": "http://www.example.com/docs/contributors/",
      "page_rank": 1
    }
  ]
}

In this example, results extracted from the Concepts page will be ranked higher than results extracted from the Contributors page.

Using custom selectors per page

If the markup of your website is so different from one page to another that you can't have generic selectors, you can namespace your selectors and specify which set of selectors should be applied to specific pages.

{
  "start_urls": [
    "http://www.example.com/docs/",
    {
      "url": "http://www.example.com/docs/concepts/",
       "selectors_key": "concepts"
    },
    {
      "url": "http://www.example.com/docs/contributors/",
       "selectors_key": "contributors"
    }
  ]
   "selectors": {
     "default": {
       "lvl0": ".main h1",
       "lvl1": ".main h2",
       "lvl2": ".main h3",
       "lvl3": ".main h4",
       "lvl4": ".main h5",
       "text": ".main p"
      },
     "concepts": {
       "lvl0": ".header h2",
       "lvl1": ".main h1.title",
       "lvl2": ".main h2.title",
       "lvl3": ".main h3.title",
       "lvl4": ".main h5.title",
       "text": ".main p"
     },
     "contributors": {
       "lvl0": ".main h1",
       "lvl1": ".contributors .name",
       "lvl2": ".contributors .title",
       "text": ".contributors .description"
     }
   }
}

Here, all documentation pages will use the selectors defined in selectors.default while the page under ./concepts will use selectors.concepts and those under ./contributors will use selectors.contributors.

selectors

This object contains all the CSS selectors that will be used to create the record hierarchy. It can contain up to 6 levels (lvl0, lvl1, lvl2, lvl3, lvl4, lvl5) and text.

A default config would be to target the page title or h1 as lvl0, the h2 as lvl1, h3 as lvl2, and p as text, but this is highly dependent on the markup.

The text key is mandatory, but we highly recommend setting also lvl0, lvl1 and lvl2 to have a decent level of relevance.

{
  "selectors": {
    "lvl0": "#content header h1",
    "lvl1": "#content article h1",
    "lvl2": "#content section h3",
    "lvl3": "#content section h4",
    "lvl4": "#content section h5",
    "lvl5": "#content section h6",
    "text": "#content header p,#content section p,#content section ol"
  }
}

Selectors can be passed as string, or as objects containing a selector key. Other special keys can be set, as documented below.

{
  "selectors": {
    "lvl0": {
      "selector": "#content header h1"
    }
  }
}

Using global selectors

The default way of extracting content through selectors is to read the HTML markup from top to bottom. This works well with semi-structured content, like a hierarchy of headers. This breaks when the relevant information is not part of the same flow. For example when the title is not part of a header or sidebar.

For that reason, you can set a selector as global, meaning that it will match on the whole page, and will be the same for all records extracted on this page.

{
  "selectors": {
    "lvl0": {
      "selector": "#content header h1",
      "global": true
    }
  }
}

Setting a default value

If your selector might not match a valid element on the page, you can define a default_value to fallback to.

{
  "selectors": {
    "lvl0": {
      "selector": "#content header h1",
      "default_value": "Documentation"
    }
  }
}

Removing unnecessary characters

Some documentation adds special characters to headings, like # or ›. Those characters have a stylistic value but no meaning and shouldn't be indexed in the search results.

You can define a list of characters you want to exclude from the final indexed value by setting the strip_chars key.

{
  "selectors": {
    "lvl0": {
      "selector": "#content header h1",
      "strip_chars": "#›"
    }
  }
}

Note that you can also define strip_chars directly at the root of the config and it will be applied to all selectors.

{
  "strip_chars": "#›"
}

Targeting elements using XPath instead of CSS

CSS selectors are a clear and concise way to target elements of a page, but they have a limitations. For example, you cannot go up the cascade with CSS.

If you need a more powerful selector mechanism, you can write your selectors using XPath by setting type: xpath.

The following example will look for a li.chapter.active.done and then go up two levels in the DOM until it finds a a. The content of this a will then be used as the value of the lvl0 selector.

{
  "selectors": {
    "lvl0": {
      "selector": "//li[@class=\"chapter active done\"]/../../a",
      "type": "xpath",
      "global": true
    }
  }
}

XPath selector can be hard to read. We highly encourage you to test them in your browser first, making sure they match what you're expecting.

Other options

custom_settings Optional

This key can be used to overwrite your Algolia index settings. We don't recommend changing it as the default settings are meant to work for all websites.

One use case would be to configure the separatorsToIndex setting. By default Algolia will consider all special character as a word separator. In some contexts, like for method names, you might want _, / or # to keep their meaning.

{
  "custom_settings": {
    "separatorsToIndex": "_/"
  }
}

Check the Algolia documentation for more information on the settings.

min_indexed_level Optional

The default value is 0. By increasing it, you can chose to not index some records if they don't have enough lvlX matching. For example, with a min_indexed_level: 2, records that have at least lvl0, lvl1 and lvl2 matching something will be indexed.

This is useful when your documentation has pages that share the same lvl0 and lvl1 for example. In that case, you don't want to index all the shared records, but want to keep the content different across pages.

{
  "min_indexed_level": 2
}

nb_hits Special

nb_hits automatically updated by DocSearch every time it runs your config. It is set to the number of records that were extracted and indexed. We check this key internally to keep track of any unintended spike or drop that could reveal a misconfiguration.

You don't have to touch it, we're documenting it here in case you were wondering what this was about.

only_content_level Optional

When only_content_level is set to true, then the crawler won't create records for the lvlX selectors.

If used, min_indexed_level is ignored.

{
  "only_content_level": true
}

scrape_start_urls Optional

By default, the crawler will extract content from the pages defined in start_urls. If you do not have any valuable content on your starts_urls or if it's a duplicate of another page, you should set this to false.

{
  "scrape_start_urls": false
}

selectors_exclude Optional

This expects an array of CSS selectors. Any element matching one of those selectors will be removed from the page before any data is extracted from it.

This can be used to remove a table of content, a sidebar, or a footer, to make other selectors easier to write.

{
  "selectors_exclude": [".footer", "ul.deprecated"]
}

stop_urls Optional

This is an array of strings or regular expressions. Whenever the crawler is about to visit a link, it will first check if the link matches something in the array. If it does, it will not follow the link. This should be used to restrict pages the crawler should visit.

Note that this is often used to avoid duplicate content, by adding http://www.example.com/docs/index.html if you already have http://www.example.com/docs/ as a start_urls.

{
  "stop_urls": ["https://www.example.com/docs/index.html", "license.html"]
}

Sitemaps

If your website has a sitemap.xml file, you can let DocSearch know and it will use it to define which pages to crawl.

sitemap_urls Optional

You can pass an array of URLs pointing to your sitemap(s) files. If this value is set, DocSearch will try to read URLs from your sitemap(s) instead of following every link of your starts_urls.

{
  "sitemap_urls": ["http://www.example.com/docs/sitemap.xml"]
}

sitemap_alternate_links Optional

Sitemaps can contain alternative links for URLs. Those are other versions of the same page, in a different language, or with a different URL. By default DocSearch will ignore those URLs.

Set this to true if you want those other versions to be crawled as well.

{
  "sitemap_urls": ["http://www.example.com/docs/sitemap.xml"],
  "sitemap_alternate_links": true
}

With the above config and the sitemap.xml below, both http://www.example.com/docs/ and http://www.example.com/docs/de/ will be crawled.

  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/docs/</loc>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://www.example.com/de/"/>
  </url>

JavaScript rendering

By default DocSearch expects websites to have server-side rendering, meaning that HTML source is returned directly by the server. If your content is generated by the front-end, you have to tell DocSearch to emulate a browser through Selenium.

As client-side crawling is way slower than server-side crawling, we highly encourage you to update your website to enable server-side rendering.

js_render Optional

Set this value to true if your website requires client-side rendering. This will make DocSearch spawn a Selenium proxy to fetch all your web pages.

{
  "js_render": true
}

js_wait Optional

If your website is slow to load, you can use js_wait to tell DocSearch to wait a specific amount of time (in seconds) for the page to load before extracting its content.

Note that this option might have a large impact on the time required to crawl your website and we would encourage you to enable server-side rendering on your website instead.

This option has no impact if js_render is set to false.

{
  "js_render": true,
  "js_wait": 2
}

use_anchors Optional

Websites using client-side rendering often don't use full urls, but instead take advantage of the URL hash (the part after the #).

If your website is using such urls, you should set use_anchors to true for DocSearch to index all your content.

{
  "js_render": true,
  "use_anchors": true
}

user_agent Optional

You can override the user agent used to crawl your website. By default, this value is: 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2049.0 Safari/537.36'

{
  "user_agent": "Googlebot"
}