Algolia for Zendesk

Connect your users with your help center content with the Algolia integration for Zendesk.

Improve your help center search experience with Algolia. The Algolia integration syncs your Zendesk Guide articles with Algolia, providing instant search results.

View demoView source code

Set up the Algolia connector

1. Sign in to the Algolia dashboard.

2. On the left sidebar, select Data sources.

3. On the Connectors page, find Zendesk Knowledge Base and click Connect

4. Click Create a new source to start the setup.

5. If you’ve already allowed Algolia to access your Zendesk account, select the authentication from the OAuth 2.0 list. Otherwise, enter your Zendesk subdomain and click Connect to Zendesk.

   1. A new window will redirect you to Zendesk. There, allow Algolia to read your Zendesk Help Center.
   2. When you are redirected back to the Algolia Dashboard, select Create a new OAuth 2.0 authentication in the modal’s input, update the Zendesk authentication URL with your Zendesk subdomain, optionally specify a name for the authentication and click Create authentication.
   3. You can now refresh the connector setup page and select the authentication in the list.

6. Fill the form with the following values:

   • Account name: Your Zendesk subdomain. For example, if your Zendesk URL is https://my-zendesk-app.zendesk.com, then your account name is my-zendesk-app.

   • Content to index: The Zendesk object you want to index. Choose between articles or posts. Each connector can only index one type of content. If you want to index both objects, select one and create a new connector for the other.

   • Max Content Size: The connector will truncate the content to the specified size. The default value is 5,000 characters. To keep the size of your Algolia index small, keep the default value.

7. Click Create source to continue.

Configure the Algolia index

1. Configure the Algolia index as destination for your Zendesk content.
2. Create the task for indexing the Zendesk content. You can define how often the content is synced.

When the connector is created, you can directly trigger a crawl by clicking run task.

Update your theme

To replace the default search with Algolia Search, you need to update your help center theme. For more information, see Customizing your help center theme in the Zendesk documentation.

Replace the default Zendesk search with Algolia

1. In your Zendesk Guide, on the sidebar, click Customize design.

2. In the Themes section, select the theme you want to modify.

3. From the list of templates, select the template document_head.hbs.

4. Add the following code to the end of the document_head.hbs template:

   HTML

   <link
     rel="stylesheet"
     type="text/css"
     href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/algoliasearch.zendesk-hc@2.32.0/dist/algoliasearch.zendesk-hc.min.css"
   />
   <script
     type="text/javascript"
     src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/algoliasearch.zendesk-hc@2.32.0/dist/algoliasearch.zendesk-hc.min.js"
   ></script>
   <script type="text/javascript">
     algoliasearchZendeskHC({
       applicationId: "ALGOLIA_APPLICATION_ID",
       apiKey: "ALGOLIA_SEARCH_API_KEY",
       subdomain: "ZENDESK_SUBDOMAIN",
       indexName: "ALGOLIA_INDEX_NAME",
     });
   </script>
   

Preview your changes

1. Click Preview. For more information, see Previewing your changes in the Zendesk documentation.
2. Enter a few letters in the search box. The autocomplete menu should show results from Algolia. If you just connected Algolia with your help center, the initial upload of your articles might take a moment.

If you want to change the look of your search, see Customize the CSS.

Next steps

After installing the Algolia for Zendesk integration and replacing the default search in your help center, you can change the configuration, you can customize the theme, or you can update the translations.