on web

Search for Firebase

I wanted a simple way to do searches on my firebase content. Nodejs seemed the way to go, as setting up a server is easy and it works great with Firebase too. As a search engine I decided to use lunr.js, it's fast and easy to setup.

Installation

npm install firebase
npm install lunr

Next we need some imports:

var Firebase = require("firebase");
var lunr = require("lunr");
var http = require('http');
var url = require('url');

lunr.js requires to define the structure of the index:

var index = lunr(function () {
    this.field('title', {boost: 10})
    this.field('description')
    this.ref('id')
})

Next we monitor our data and update the index accordingly:

var ref = new Firebase("YOUR URL");
ref.child("topics").on("child_added", function(snapshot) {
        ref.child("topics").child(snapshot.key()).on("value", function(snapshot) {
                index.update({
                        id: snapshot.val().id,
                        title: snapshot.val().title,
                        description: snapshot.val().desc
                });
                console.log("updated index for " + snapshot.val().id);
        });
});
ref.child("topics").on("child_removed", function(snapshot) {
        index.remove({id:snapshot.key()});
        console.log("removed index for " + snapshot.key());
});

Basically we monitor each topic for changes and monitor deletes. If something changes we update our index.

Next we create a webserver and handle the search requests. I'm using the get parameter q. So a search request from a client would look like: http://supersearch.com?q=Team.

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
        var url_parts = url.parse(req.url, true);
        var query = url_parts.query.q;
        console.log("search query: "+query)
        res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'application/json'});
        res.end(JSON.stringify(index.search(query)));
}).listen(1337, '127.0.0.1');

And that's already all that's needed.
Here's the whole file: https://gist.github.com/D-32/2dfde2bcf6f149a9ec09