Search by Algolia
What is online retail merchandising? An introduction
e-commerce

What is online retail merchandising? An introduction

Done any shopping on an ecommerce website lately? If so, you know a smooth online shopper experience is not optional ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

5 considerations for Black Friday 2023 readiness
e-commerce

5 considerations for Black Friday 2023 readiness

It’s hard to imagine having to think about Black Friday less than 4 months out from the previous one ...

Piyush Patel

Chief Strategic Business Development Officer

How to increase your sales and ROI with optimized ecommerce merchandising
e-commerce

How to increase your sales and ROI with optimized ecommerce merchandising

What happens if an online shopper arrives on your ecommerce site and: Your navigation provides no obvious or helpful direction ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Mobile search UX best practices, part 3: Optimizing display of search results
ux

Mobile search UX best practices, part 3: Optimizing display of search results

In part 1 of this blog-post series, we looked at app interface design obstacles in the mobile search experience ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Mobile search UX best practices, part 2: Streamlining search functionality
ux

Mobile search UX best practices, part 2: Streamlining search functionality

In part 1 of this series on mobile UX design, we talked about how designing a successful search user experience ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Mobile search UX best practices, part 1: Understanding the challenges
ux

Mobile search UX best practices, part 1: Understanding the challenges

Welcome to our three-part series on creating winning search UX design for your mobile app! This post identifies developer ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Teaching English with Zapier and Algolia
engineering

Teaching English with Zapier and Algolia

National No Code Day falls on March 11th in the United States to encourage more people to build things online ...

Alita Leite da Silva

How AI search enables ecommerce companies to boost revenue and cut costs
ai

How AI search enables ecommerce companies to boost revenue and cut costs

Consulting powerhouse McKinsey is bullish on AI. Their forecasting estimates that AI could add around 16 percent to global GDP ...

Michelle Adams

Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia

What is digital product merchandising?
e-commerce

What is digital product merchandising?

How do you sell a product when your customers can’t assess it in person: pick it up, feel what ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Scaling marketplace search with AI
ai

Scaling marketplace search with AI

It is clear that for online businesses and especially for Marketplaces, content discovery can be especially challenging due to the ...

Bharat Guruprakash

Chief Product Officer

The changing face of digital merchandising
e-commerce

The changing face of digital merchandising

This 2-part feature dives into the transformational journey made by digital merchandising to drive positive ecommerce experiences. Part 1 ...

Reshma Iyer

Director of Product Marketing, Ecommerce

What’s a convolutional neural network and how is it used for image recognition in search?
ai

What’s a convolutional neural network and how is it used for image recognition in search?

A social media user is shown snapshots of people he may know based on face-recognition technology and asked if ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

What’s organizational knowledge and how can you make it accessible to the right people?
product

What’s organizational knowledge and how can you make it accessible to the right people?

How’s your company’s organizational knowledge holding up? In other words, if an employee were to leave, would they ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Adding trending recommendations to your existing e-commerce store
engineering

Adding trending recommendations to your existing e-commerce store

Recommendations can make or break an online shopping experience. In a world full of endless choices and infinite scrolling, recommendations ...

Ashley Huynh

Ecommerce trends for 2023: Personalization
e-commerce

Ecommerce trends for 2023: Personalization

Algolia sponsored the 2023 Ecommerce Site Search Trends report which was produced and written by Coleman Parkes Research. The report ...

Piyush Patel

Chief Strategic Business Development Officer

10 ways to know it’s fake AI search
ai

10 ways to know it’s fake AI search

You think your search engine really is powered by AI? Well maybe it is… or maybe not.  Here’s a ...

Michelle Adams

Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia

Cosine similarity: what is it and how does it enable effective (and profitable) recommendations?
ai

Cosine similarity: what is it and how does it enable effective (and profitable) recommendations?

You looked at this scarf twice; need matching mittens? How about an expensive down vest? You watched this goofy flick ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

What is cognitive search, and what could it mean for your business?
ai

What is cognitive search, and what could it mean for your business?

“I can’t find it.”  Sadly, this conclusion is often still part of the modern enterprise search experience. But ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Looking for something?

The journey to better DX: Create InstantSearch App
facebookfacebooklinkedinlinkedintwittertwittermailmail

InstantSearch by Algolia is a family of frontend libraries to create search UIs on top of Algolia APIs.

Today, we’re introducing Create InstantSearch App: a command-line interface (CLI) to bootstrap InstantSearch applications from the terminal. All you need is Node.js ≥ 8, you don’t need to install anything else.

Create InstantSearch App preview

Why

Developer Experience (DX) has always been in Algolia’s DNA. We constantly want to improve the interaction between developers and our products. A lot of efforts have been spent on the Algolia Dashboard to facilitate your search setup and on our API clients to communicate easily with our servers. On the other hand, our frontend solution to build search interfaces — InstantSearch — yet powerful, is quite complex to get started with.

When only InstantSearch.js was available, kicking a vanilla JavaScript application was pretty straightforward. Now that we support many environments (React, React Native, Vue, Angular, iOS, and Android), you’re likely to spend more time on tooling rather than actual search implementation. We already provide good component primitives to build search UIs, but what could we do better on our side?

We drew inspiration from Facebook and more specifically Create React App — an awesome project that the React team is conducting to improve the React developer experience and onboarding.

Create InstantSearch App lets you focus on your project by taking care of all the tedious and repetitive work, regardless of your ecosystem:

  • Do you have a new dataset to use? Run the CLI and enter the credentials to access this dataset.
  • Do you have a new client to build a demo for? Run the CLI, enter the application credentials and start building the experience.
  • Do you need help from the Algolia team? Use an online template generated by Create InstantSearch App and send it to us! We’ll do our best to help you make your search experience great.

This tool is about actual search implementation rather than the process of building an app. It creates a working UI based on the given information. We’ve been using Create InstantSearch App internally for a few weeks before announcing it and it has immensely improved our productivity.

How we use the tool at Algolia

Help quickly delight users

At Algolia, Solution Engineers are customer-facing engineers building proof of concepts for clients and partners. They often need to create InstantSearch applications, demo and iterate on them. This tool helps them increase the speed of development to showcase what is possible for their business.

Help Algolia help you

Bug reproduction is often the best way to solve issues. Create InstantSearch App allows users to reproduce bugs either:

The latter is now our go-to way to help customers identify issues. We send them a link to the online template, they fork it and showcase the bug. This happens entirely in the browser.

Help you understand InstantSearch

Tooling should never get in the way of new users. While rewriting the entire Algolia documentation, we decided to skip the tooling explanation in all our Getting Started guides and to advocate using Create InstantSearch App. We even used it to bootstrap our new interactive tutorial.

This is only the beginning

Create InstantSearch App is only the beginning of our journey to better frontend DX. We have much more to achieve and are looking forward to sharing more improvements. Meanwhile, give our InstantSearch libraries a try!

npx create-instantsearch-app my-app

You can find the documentation and the source code on GitHub. If you have any feedback don’t hesitate to let us know on Github, tweet to us or comment on this post.

About the author
François Chalifour

Software Engineer

githubtwitter

Algolia documentation

It's extensive, clear, and, of course, searchable.

Read the docs
Algolia documentation

Recommended Articles

Powered byAlgolia Algolia Recommend

Harnessing API’s with React: a different approach
engineering

Alexandre Stanislawski

Connectors, Docs & the Future — a Deeper Look into InstantSearch.js v2
product

Alexandre Stanislawski

Redesigning Our Docs – Part 5 – Building an Interactive InstantSearch Showcase
engineering

Sarah Dayan

Staff Software Engineer