Algolia DocSearch works by crawling the content of your website every 24 hours and putting all the content in an Algolia index. This content is then queried directly from your front-end using the Algolia API. Note that your website needs to be publicly available for this to work (i.e., not behind a firewall). The service is free.
To connect your docs with Algolia, add an `algolia` field in your `themeConfig`. **[Apply for DocSearch](https://docsearch.algolia.com/apply/)** to get your Algolia index and API key.
Still, you can reuse the [Infima CSS variables](styling-layout#styling-your-site-with-infima) from Docusaurus to style DocSearch by editing the `/src/css/custom.css` file.
<!-- TODO: update options link once the documentation is available on the DocSearch website -->
Algolia DocSearch supports a [list of options](https://autocomplete-experimental.netlify.app/docs/DocSearchModal#reference) that you can pass to the `algolia` field in the `docusaurus.config.js` file.
```js title="docusaurus.config.js"
module.exports = {
themeConfig: {
// ...
algolia: {
apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY',
indexName: 'YOUR_INDEX_NAME',
// Options...
},
},
};
```
### Editing the Algolia search component
If you prefer to edit the Algolia search React component, swizzle the `SearchBar` component in `@docusaurus/theme-search-algolia`:
This will create a `src/themes/SearchBar` file in your project folder. Restart your dev server and edit the component, you will see that Docusaurus uses your own `SearchBar` component now.
**Notes**: You can alternatively [swizzle from Algolia SearchBar](#editing-the-algolia-search-component) and create your own search component from there.