Learn Algolia, Angularfire and Jasmine

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

algolia

Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

In this lesson Trevor looks at testing AngularJS controllers with scope inheritance with Jasmine and test spies.

Testing Controllers With Dependencies

Custom Jasmine Matchers are a great way to keep your AngularJS Unit Tests clean and tidy. We want to make expectations **readable** and express the intent of the test. Custom matchers help to accomplish this.

Custom Jasmine 1.3 Matchers

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

An introduction on unit testing a ReactJS component using Webpack and Jasmine. Learn how to use Webpack to package and import dependencies plus take advantage of the babel-loader to write a simple Jasmine spec using the latest ES6 syntax.

Unit testing a React component using Jasmine and Webpack

AngularJS provides helpers for convenient testing of your application. In this lesson you will learn how to test a basic controller with Jasmine and Angular.

Testing a Controller

Firebase provides a real-time syncing backend for your AngularJS applications in very few lines of code. In this lesson, you'll learn how to get started integrating it into your app.

Get Started with Firebase and AngularFire

In this lesson John shows some tricks for speeding up your test suite. He digs into some handy features of WebStorm, including the *ddescriber* plugin, as well as some alternative methods for Jasmine for selectively running your tests.

Speed Testing with WebStorm and Jasmine

One of the beautiful things about dependency injection in your AngularJS apps is the ability to replace dependencies in your unit tests. In this lesson Trevor looks at how to configure Jasmine spies as injectable replacements for dependencies for testing.

Inject Jasmine Spies With $provide

Testing is a first class citizen in AngularJS. It is at its heart and soul. This lesson demonstrates using Karma to write a simple unit test for a Filter.

Unit Testing AngularJS

Unit testing a React component using Webpack and Jasmine, can involve slow and repetitive tasks when confirming that tests are passing when your code changes. For example, manually running commands instructing webpack to compile code plus refreshing the browser. This lesson demonstrates how to speed up your development time by automating these tasks using webpack-dev-server.

Reloading React component tests using webpack-dev-server

Using Jasmine, this lesson will look at testing an AngularJS service.

Testing a Service

This will get you started on how to setup the Javascript API client of Algolia search solution. To follow along the video having a free Algolia account already setup will make things easier (but is not required). Once the client is setup we will test it by pushing a couple of records to an index.  

Set up the Algolia JavaScript Client

We’ll load a simple JSON file containing 500 actors records from disk and push it to our Algolia index using the Javascript API client.

Push JSON Data to an Algolia Index from the JavaScript Client

We’ll learn how to push a small amount of data from a local MySQL database to an Algolia index. The first step is to connect to the DB using the `mysql` package, then select all records from the DB and finally push them to Algolia using the JS API client.

Push MySQL Data to an Algolia Index from the JS Client

Using the Lodash library, we’ll see how to split large amounts of data from a local MySQL database into smaller chunks and push them to an Algolia index.  

Push Chunks of Large MySQL Data to an Algolia Index with Lodash

Before playing with Instantsearch widgets and build a rich search experience, the fundamental step is to understand what the library will be dealing with. In this lesson we we’ll cover the anatomy of the JSON search API response send back by Algolia for each search query and how it can be used.

Anatomy of an Algolia Search API Response

We now have a good understanding of the API Response structure, we could go playing with instantsearch JS library right away, that said this Library is building on top of the JS API Client. To get a better grasp on how it works at a lower level, let’s play first with raw hits straight from the JS API client, we’ll take care of better UI with Instantsearch JS right after that.

Leverage the Algolia JS API Client to Display Raw Hits from the API Response

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

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