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Search & Browse xkcd by topic & keywords | Using Typesense, an open source Algolia alternative and an easier-to-use alternative to Elasticsearch
xkcd search
This is a demo that showcases some of Typesense's features using xkcd comics and metadata from explain xkcd.
View it live here: https://findxkcd.com/
Tech Stack
This search experience is powered by Typesense which is a fast, open source typo-tolerant search-engine. It is an open source alternative to Algolia and an easier-to-use alternative to ElasticSearch.
The app was built using the Typesense Adapter for InstantSearch.js and is hosted on Cloudflare Pages.
The search/browsing backend is powered by a geo-distributed 3-node Typesense cluster running on Typesense Cloud, with nodes in Oregon, Frankfurt and Mumbai.
Repo structure
-
src/
andindex.html
- contain the frontend UI components, built with Typesense Adapter for InstantSearch.js -
scripts/
- contains the scripts to extract, transform and index the data into Typesense.
Development
-
Create a
.env
file using.env.example
as reference. -
Fetch Data
mkdir -p data/raw
yarn fetchData
- Transform and index the data
yarn transformData
yarn indexData
- Install dependencies and run the local server:
yarn
yarn start
Open http://localhost:3000 to see the app.
Update data
# Delete cached files that might not have had explanations during previous run
find data/raw -name "*.html" -type f -exec grep -l "explanation may be incomplete" {} + | xargs -r rm
yarn fetchData
# Handle 503s
find data/raw -name "*.html" -type f -exec grep -l "server is temporarily unable" {} + | xargs -r rm
find data/raw -name "*.json" -type f -exec grep -l "<html>" {} + | xargs -r rm
# Refresh and index
yarn refreshData
Deployment
The app is hosted on Cloudflare Pages and is set to auto-deploy on git push