The netlifycms.org page has been live for about a month now and launched with a missing feature, the ability to search.


Adding search to JAMstack sites is a new thing for me but not a new thing for Algolia. Algolia is a hosted search tool that provides lightning fast search results. I decided to give Algolia a try for our new Netlify CMS documentation and discovered their DocSearch solution.


DocSearch started as a way for the Algolia Search team to scratch their own itch, which is providing a truly easy way to add search to documentation. Learning new tools and frameworks can be a challenge when it is unclear how to find what you are looking for. Getting started with DocSearch simply requires you to fill out the two fields on the community DocSearch page. Algolia will do the scraping of your documentation data for you and provide a script tag that wraps the returned content in a JSON. Once submitted, it took less than 12 hours to complete and return (most of that time, I was sleeping).


I had a great experience integrating the return search script and spent minimal time with my designer to make sure it integrated with our existing design as well. I did have two small issues but got resolutions rather quickly thanks to DocSearch being an open source project supported by Algolia engineers and the community. I was able to get resolutions for issues #175 & #178 in record time.

There are other options for implementing search solutions, but I have found none are as simple as the Algolia's hosted solutions, including our implementation on netlify.com which uses gulp and lunar. I hope to provide a follow-up post on how we upgraded that to Algolia's Instant Search.

I’m proud to say Netlify CMS is onboard with other open-source projects like React, Babel, and Stripe who all use DocSearch as their search solution. I recommend Algolia for all search needs and encourage you to try it out in our new Netlify CMS documentation page.