Migrating from Algolia to Elasticsearch with Searchkit

One of the most common questions we get asked is how to migrate from Algolia to Elasticsearch. With Searchkit v4 and Instantsearch support, we’ve made it easier than ever to migrate from Algolia to Elasticsearch. In this post, we’ll show you how to migrate from Algolia to Elasticsearch with Searchkit.

Setting up Elasticsearch

Setting up and maintaining our own search engine cluster can be time-consuming. We will be using Elastic Cloud for this, but the setup can work with an ElasticSearch index hosted anywhere.

You can read more on how to set up Elasticsearch (opens in a new tab) and indexing data (opens in a new tab).

Setting up Searchkit and Instantsearch Client

Install the dependencies for Searchkit and Instantsearch Client.

yarn add searchkit @searchkit/instantsearch-client

and setup the configuration for Searchkit.

 
import Searchkit from "searchkit"
import Client from '@searchkit/instantsearch-client'
 
const sk = new Searchkit({
  connection: {
    host: 'https://commerce-demo.es.us-east4.gcp.elastic-cloud.com:9243',
    apiKey: 'a2Rha1VJTUJMcGU4ajA3Tm9fZ0Y6MjAzX2pLbURTXy1hNm9SUGZGRlhJdw=='
  },
  search_settings: {
    // attributes to highlight or snippet
    highlight_attributes: ['title'],
    snippet_attributes: ['plot'],
    search_attributes: [{ field: 'title', weight: 3 }, 'actors', 'plot'],
    result_attributes: ['title', 'actors', 'poster', 'plot'],
    facet_attributes: [
      'type',
      { attribute: 'actors', field: 'actors.keyword', type: 'string' },
      'rated',
      { attribute: 'imdbrating', type: 'numeric', field: 'imdbrating' },
      { attribute: 'metascore', type: 'numeric', field: 'metascore' }
    ],
  }
)

Using the Instantsearch Client

Then we can use Searchkit's Instantsearch Client to connect to Searchkit.

 
import Client from '@searchkit/instantsearch-client'
 
const searchClient = Client(searchkitClient);
 
export default function App() {
  return (
    <InstantSearch searchClient={searchClient} indexName="movies">
      <Configure hitsPerPage={10} />
      <SearchBox />
      <Hits hitComponent={MovieHits} />
      <Pagination />
    </InstantSearch>
  );
}

Proxy Search Requests through Node

We can use a proxy to forward requests from Searchkit to Elasticsearch. This is recommended for production use.

yarn add @searchkit/api

Below is an example of a Next.js API handler that proxies requests to Elasticsearch.

import Client from "@searchkit/api";
import { NextApiRequest, NextApiResponse } from "next";
 
const client = Client({
  connection: {
    host: "<elasticsearch-host>",
    apiKey: "<api-key>", // optional
  },
  search_settings: {
    // ... search settings
  },
});
 
// example API handler for Next.js
export default async function handler(
  req,
  res
) {
  const results = await client.handleRequest(req.body);
  res.send(results);
}

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