Learn Algolia, Bash and Reactfire

🚀 In this collection, I will be going over some command line tools I use on a daily basis that make my life a lot easier.

[First up is fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf).

> fzf is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder.

Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. Bash is a command processor that typically runs in a text window, where the user types commands that cause actions. Bash can also read and execute commands from a file, called a shell script.

bash

Upgrade Your Terminal and Make It a Joy to Work with

Extracting meaningful data from strings is a crucial skill when working with bash, and bash gives us powerful tools to do so: `head`, `tail`, `cut`, `sed`, and `awk`. But these tools can be hard to understand without spending time to learn them, so many developers fall into a rut of blindly copying and pasting commands. No more! With this mini-course, you'll understand the basic ins and outs of these commands in under 15 minutes. 


Manipulating strings in bash

SSH provides a secure way for your to [connect to and authenticate with GitHub's servers](https://help.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/about-ssh). While HTTPS connections use usernames and passwords as credentials, SSH instead uses public and private key pairs. These can be generated on your system using a CLI like [`ssh-keygen`](https://help.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/generating-a-new-ssh-key-and-adding-it-to-the-ssh-agent) and then associated with your GitHub account using the public key.

In some cases, you may need to connect to more than one GitHub account from the same system. For example, you may have [separate accounts for personal and professional projects](https://ryanharris.dev/managing-ssh-keys-for-github/), which can be difficult to manage manually. Using `ssh-agent` and a SSH configuration file, you can alleviate this pain point by automatically determining which key to use based on your GitHub repository's `git` URL.

Secure GitHub connections with SSH

“Setting up remote server authentication” will never be on your job description. It’s not one of those desirable responsibilities that convinces talented people to move across the country and pursue the job of their dreams.

But at that dream job, you might be asked to set up an SSH key. You’d better be ready.

In this course, we will learn the fundamentals of creating SSH keys and configuring them for connectivity to a remote server. We’ll figure out how to:

- tunnel SSH connections for easier local debugging
- set up configuration files to simplify the aspect of connecting to remote servers
- use security features like blocking incoming connections

Being prepared is key. Learn the skills now!

SSH for Remote Server Authentication

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

Bash makes automation easy. Just a few lines of code can take care of repetitive tasks for you and your teammates. 

In this course, we’ll dive deep into the automation potential of bash. You’ll learn to leverage common hooks that open up interesting automation possibilities, like git hooks, adding functions and aliases in your bash_profile, and running scheduled jobs in launchd.

For example, we’ll write a git hook that checks package.json for changes, and if there are changes, the hook runs npm install for you automatically. 

Along the way, you’ll also learn:

- more advanced bash commands like exec
- syntax such as redirecting stdout and stderr to the same destination
- timesaving tricks like brace expansions

Automation is all about saving you time — and at only 52 minutes, this course is well worth yours. Enjoy!

Advanced Bash Automation for Web Developers



Humans were never meant to repeat joyless tasks in a precise manner, over and over and over. Computers are meant precisely for these types of tasks.

Bash is a ubiquitous technology in web development that gives you the immense power of automating repetitive tasks you find yourself performing throughout the day.

The topics we cover will give you confidence in creating build scripts that run on continuous integration servers or quickly testing and debugging an API with `curl`. We’ll go over:  - Interacting with the file system - Creating, moving, copying, and deleting files and folders - Finding files and text patterns in files - Creating and running scripts - Language syntax like variables and conditionals.

Automate Daily Development Tasks with Bash

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

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.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

Lots of if and if else statements are hard to read and tough to maintain in any language, and bash is no exception. In this lesson, we’ll learn how to use `case`, bash’s construct for a switch statement. In bash, `case` actually does pattern matching, which gives some great flexibility. We’ll write a script that will uncompress a variety of different archive file  types (like .tar or .zip), based on their file extension. 

Use case for Complicated Conditional Statements in Bash

Let’s say you want to allow a user to pass a `-v` flag to turn on verbose logging in a script. Manually parsing out options passed to a script is difficult, but in this lesson, we’ll learn about `getopts` which makes it easy. We'll look at the limitations of using getopts (options must be in a format like `-a` or `-ab <value>`) as well as the importance of shifting processed options off of the argument array. 

Create a Bash Script that Accepts Named Options with getopts

In this lesson, we’ll apply our knowledge of `getopts` and create a script that opens a PR on Github, all without leaving your terminal. We’ll use `getopts` to take 3 options: username, password or token, and PR title. We’ll use any input after that as the body of the PR. We’ll validate the input and then use `curl` to POST it to Github. 

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