Quickstart with the Python API client

Supported platforms

The Algolia Python API client requires Python 3.4 or later.

Install

Install the latest version of the Python API client with pip:

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python -m pip install --upgrade algoliasearch

Quickstart sample app

To download and run a self-contained example, see the Python quickstart on GitHub.

Initialize the client

To start, you need to initialize the client. To do this, you need your Application ID and API Key. You can find both on your Algolia account.

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from algoliasearch.search_client import SearchClient

client = SearchClient.create('YourApplicationID', 'YourWriteAPIKey')
index = client.init_index('your_index_name')

The API key displayed here is your Admin API key. To maintain security, never use your Admin API key on your frontend, nor share it with anyone. In your frontend, only use the search-only API key or any other key that has search-only rights.

Push data

Without any prior configuration, you can start indexing 500 contacts in the contacts index using the following code:

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index = client.init_index('contacts')
batch = json.load(open('contacts.json'))
index.save_objects(batch, {'autoGenerateObjectIDIfNotExist': True})

Configure

You can customize settings to fine-tune the search behavior. For example, you can add a custom ranking by number of followers to further enhance the built-in relevance:

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index.set_settings({"customRanking": ["desc(followers)"]})

You can also configure the list of attributes you want to index by order of importance (most important first).

Algolia suggests results as you type, which means you’ll generally search by prefix. In this case, the order of attributes is crucial in deciding which hit is the best.

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index.set_settings({"searchableAttributes": ["lastname", "firstname", "company",
                                         "email", "city", "address"]})

Search

Once configured, you can search for contacts by attributes such as firstname, lastname, or company (even with typos):

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# Search for a first name
print(index.search('jimmie'))
# Search for a first name with typo
print(index.search('jimie'))
# Search for a company
print(index.search('california paint'))
# Search for a first name and a company
print(index.search('jimmie paint'))

Search UI

Use one of Algolia’s frontend libraries to build your search UI:

• InstantSearch.
• Autocomplete

However, if you don’t want to use the libraries, you can build a custom UI:

1. Design UI components with your preferred frontend system: a search box, results display, filters, and any other desired Algolia features
2. Send search requests with the API client
3. Parse the JSON response from the search request and display the results in your custom UI.