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May 20th 2021 product
We know why you are here. You want to learn how to integrate Google Firebase Firestore database with Algolia search.
Firebase Firestore is a NoSQL cloud database that provides structure to manage your data into multiple collections. It is scalable, serverless and it provides synchronization between client and server and offline mode. Most importantly, it is highly secure and it comes at a reasonable cost.
However, Firebase does not support search functionality out of the box. To solve this, you needed to turn to a third party application — and the one recommended by Firebase is in fact Algolia.
We have a search product that enables full-text search that is fast, relevant, API-first, and has a solid free plan that makes it easy to start and grow your product. We also provide a wide choice of client libraries and SDKs for all major languages/platforms and are very proud of our documentation.
Up until today, however, integrating Algolia and Firebase involved a non-trivial number of steps. Today, we are excited to announce the Firestore<>Algolia extension.
Let me provide a high level integration diagram on what we are trying to achieve with these two products in your stack.
So how do we implement the above architecture with the new Firebase Extension Framework?
There are many articles and blog posts that describe the implementation. The gist of it was to use Cloud Function to implement the logic to monitor the Firestore database and push changes to Algolia indexes. This required writing code in Google Cloud Functions to wire and monitor changes to the Firestore database, as well as maintaining and supporting the integration.
At Fireconf 2019, Firebase announced the Firebase Extensions Framework. The idea is to provide users with configuration-only extensions maintained and supported by extension providers. We are proud to have become a part of this framework in 2021, as announced at Google I/O. The Algolia extension can be installed with a click of a button or using a CLI, which will kick off a process to provision the Cloud Function to monitor the Firestore database for changes based on the configuration information provided by the developer. Let’s see this in action.
1. Navigate to the Firebase Extension listing page.
For details on the extension, click on “See Details”.
2. Click “Install in console” to start the installation process. The first step in the process is to create or select an existing Firebase project.
3. You will be prompted to enter the following configurations:
NOTE: This extension can be installed multiple times monitoring different collections and pushing the changes to a central Algolia Search Index or a separate Index for each collection.
That’s it! Now go ahead and click install and configure to your heart’s desire, and don’t forget to send us feedback: twitter.com/algolia. Happy configuring!
There are known limitations on the extension, which will be addressed in future releases.
Create a full-featured search experience in no time.
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