Learn Algolia, Hapi and Redwoodjs

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

hapi is a battle-tested, full-featured, framework for building web applications and services with Node.js. With integrated support for essentials like authentication, caching and validation, and a powerful plugin system, hapi is ideal for projects and teams of any size.

This course will introduce hapi, some of it’s plugins, and guide you through many of hapi’s core features.

A rich framework for building applications and services hapi enables developers to focus on writing reusable application logic instead of spending time building infrastructure.

hapi

Introduction to Node Servers with Hapi.js

View engines, or template engines, allow you to maintain a clean separation between your presentation layer and the rest of your application. This video will demonstrate how to use the vision plugin with hapi to enable template support.

hapi.js - View engines 

hapi does not support serving static files out of the box. Instead it relies on a module called Inert. This lesson will cover serving static files using Inert's custom handlers.

hapi.js - Serving static files

Routing is a fundamental aspect of any framework. In this lesson, you'll learn how to use path parameters in hapi's router. We'll also touch on how the router uses specificity to order routes internally.

hapi.js - Route parameters

hapi doesn't ship with logging support baked in. Luckily, hapi's rich plugin ecosystem includes everything needed to configure logging for your application. This video will introduce good, a process monitor for hapi, and good-console, a reporter for good that outputs to standard out.

hapi.js - Logging with good and good-console

hapi makes handling POST and PUT payloads easy by buffering and parsing them automatically without requiring additional modules or middleware. This video will demonstrate how to handle JSON and form based request payloads via hapi's route configuration.

hapi.js - POST and PUT request payloads

hapi's reply interface is one of it's most powerful features. It's smart enough to detect and serialize objects, buffers, promises and even streams. This video will demonstrate first hand how to use the reply method to send your data to the client, no matter the format.

hapi.js - Replying to Requests

Think of hapi's `reply()` function as "what you want to say" and the `response` object as "how you want to say it". While `reply` controls the payload sent to the client, the `response` object will allow you to control how the client interprets the payload by manipulating status code, content type, state and more.

hapi.js - Using the response object

hapi automatically responds with JSON for any error passed to a route's `reply()` method. But what if your application needs errors rendered in HTML? This lesson shows how to implement friendly HTML error messages using hapi extension events.

hapi.js - Friendly error pages with extension events

hapi supports request validation out of the box using the joi module. Request path parameters, payloads, and querystring parameters can be validated with joi's simple, yet powerful, notation. This lesson covers the basics of validating requests using joi.

hapi.js - Request Validation with Joi

hapi has built-in support for parsing cookies from a request headers, and writing cookies to a response, making state management easy and straight-forward. It even has built in support for cookie encryption and auto detects when a cookie contains JSON, parsing or stringifying automatically.

hapi.js - Managing State with Cookies

hapi is a rock solid server framework for Node.js. Its focus on modularity and configuration-over-convention makes it the perfect match for any size development team. This video will introduce you to hapi by showing you the bare minimum needed to run a hapi server.

hapi.js - Up and running

Instead of using middlware, hapi provides a number of points during the lifecycle of a request that you can hook-in to provide additional functionality, called "extension events". This lesson will give you an introduction to using extension events, and show how they can be used to manipulate the request or response in-flight.

hapi.js - Extending the request with lifecycle events

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

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

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.

Search

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