Quick Tip: Easy Search with Netlify

I just love Netlify; they always have something interesting. I found this extension for adding search to your site. You can use it either client-side or server-side. It’s a step you can add to the build that indexes your pages into a JSON file.

For a client-side implementation, you need to ship the file to the client, probably not optimal. Note: there are several client-side tools out there that have more features.

For a server-side implementation, Netlify will spin up a lambda function for you. Granted, this is probably not a production-ready solution but the concept is perfect for many uses cases.

How to.

Tell Netlify you want it to index your site and create a function by adding this to netlify.toml .

netlify.toml

[[plugins]]
  package = 'netlify-plugin-search-index'
    [plugins.inputs]
      generatedFunctionName = 'mySearchFunction'
      publishDirJSONFileName = 'null'

That’s it! You can now use a URL like this to search your site.

https://yoursite.netlify.com/.netlify/functions/mySearchFunction?search=foo