Search API

Search API (previously known as "rummager") indexes content into Opensearch and serves the GOV.UK Search API.

GOV.UK applications use the API to search and filter GOV.UK content. For example, alphagov/finder-frontend uses the search API to render finder pages (such as gov.uk/aaib-reports). search-api-v2 replaces Search API in several areas: for the latest on this, visit https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/manual/govuk-search.html.

Search API also provides a public API: https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json.

See the Search API user guide for how to use the public API.

Publishing finders

Search API is responsible for publishing "finders" and their corresponding email signup content items via a dedicated rake task:

FINDER_CONFIG=news_and_communications.yml \
EMAIL_SIGNUP_CONFIG=news_and_communications_email_signup.yml \
publishing_api:publish_finder

Technical documentation

Search API is a Sinatra application that interfaces with Opensearch.

You can use the GOV.UK Docker environment to run the application and its tests with all the necessary dependencies. Follow the usage instructions to get started.

To replicate real data into your local development environment, use the replicate-opensearch script provided by GOV.UK Docker.

Use GOV.UK Docker to run any commands that follow.

Running the test suite

bundle exec rake

Pact tests

Search API has a pact with GDS API Adapters.

See the guidance on Pact testing for how to run and modify the tests.

Note that when you run the tests locally logs are output to log/production.log rather than to the console.

Additional Docs

• Search API documentation: how to use the public API
• Search relevancy: how relevancy ordering works when performing a search
• Schemas: how to work with schemas and the document types
• Autocomplete: how to get autocomplete suggestions for search queries - not currently used by finder-frontend
• Popularity: how popularity is updated
• Quality-metrics: how to assess the quality of results

Licence

MIT License