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Algolia doesn’t directly search your data sources. Instead, you upload the parts of your data that are relevant for search to Algolia. Algolia stores this data in an index: a data structure optimized for fast search.

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Required credentials

To send data to Algolia, you need an Application ID and a valid API key (with addObjects permission). You can find them in the API Keys section of Algolia’s dashboard.
  • Application ID. Your Application ID is what Algolia uses to identify your app, where all your indices live.
  • API key. API keys control access to Algolia’s API and determine what you’re allowed to do, such as searching an index, or adding new records. For better security, create specific API keys with minimal permissions for indexing tasks, which you should only use in server-side code. Keep your indexing API keys secret.
Only use the Admin API key to create other API keys. Don’t use the Admin API key in your apps.

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Set up the API client

First, install and set up your API client. For installation instructions, see:

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Fetch your data

Before sending anything to Algolia, you need to retrieve your data. You can do this in several ways, depending on the nature of your app.

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From a database

function fetchDataFromDatabase() {
  // Fetch data from your database
}

$records = fetchDataFromDatabase();

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From a file

You can use this actors dataset to test this out. 
$records = json_decode(file_get_contents('actors.json'), true);

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From the source code directly

Only use this method for exploration purposes or if you have a small amount of data. 
$records = [
  ['name' => 'Tom Cruise'],
  ['name' => 'Scarlett Johansson']
];

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Send the data to Algolia

Once the records are ready, you can push them to Algolia using the saveObjects method. 
var response = await client.SaveObjectsAsync(
  "ALGOLIA_INDEX_NAME",
  new List
  {
    new Dictionary { { "objectID", "1" }, { "name", "Adam" } },
    new Dictionary { { "objectID", "2" }, { "name", "Benoit" } },
  }
);

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Send your data in batches

For better performance, you should send several records at once instead of one by one. If you have many records to index, you should send them in batches.

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Next steps

After indexing your data, you can configure relevance settings.
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