Initialize the Python API client

Before you can index your data or search your Algolia indices, you must initialize a search client with your application ID and API key. You can find both in your Algolia account.

Initialize the search client

The search client handles authentication and lets you manage your indices, for example, add data to them, or search them.

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from algoliasearch.search_client import SearchClient

client = SearchClient.create('YourApplicationID', 'YourWriteAPIKey')
index = client.init_index('your_index_name')

Replace your_index_name with the name of the index you want to use. You can find your existing indices in the Algolia dashboard or using the listIndices method. If the index doesn’t exist, a new, empty index is created locally. It’s created on Algolia’s servers only if you add records to the index.

Don’t use sensitive or personally identifiable information as your index name, including usernames, IDs, or email addresses. Index names are publicly shared.

Operations that are scoped to your Algolia application through the client are:

• Manage indices
• Manage dictionaries
• Manage API keys

Operations scoped to an index are:

• Search
• Indexing
• Set and get settings
• Define synonyms
• Define Rules

The Recommend, Personalization, Insights, and A/B testing APIs come with their own clients:

Usage notes

You can use the Python API client in asynchronous environments. You need to install these additional dependencies:

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python -m pip install 'asyncio>=3.4,<4.0' 'aiohttp>=2.0,<4.0' 'async_timeout>=2.0,<4.0'

The asynchronous methods are available using a _async suffix:

The following example creates a new index and adds two test records to it asynchronously.

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import asyncio

from algoliasearch.search_client import SearchClient

app_id = 'YourApplicationID'
api_key = 'YourWriteAPIKey'

async def main():
  async with SearchClient.create(app_id, api_key) as client:
      index = client.init_index('test_index')

      response = await index.save_objects_async([
          {'objectID': 1, 'name': 'foo'},
          {'objectID': 2, 'name': 'bar'}
      ])

      results = await index.search_async('')

      print(results)

  asyncio.run(main())