canonicalwebteam.search

Flask extension to provide a search view for querying the webteam's Google Custom Search account.

Installation

pip3 install canonicalwebteam.search

Or add canonicalwebteam.search to your requirements.txt.

Usage

Local development

For local development, it's best to test this module with one of our website projects like ubuntu.com. For more information, follow this guide (internal only).

Application code

You can add the extension on your project's application as follows:

import talisker.requests
from flask import Flask
from canonicalwebteam.search import build_search_view

app = Flask("myapp")
session = talisker.requests.get_session()  # You must provide a requests session

app.add_url_rule("/search", "search", build_search_view(session))

# Or, a bit more complex example

app.add_url_rule(
    "/docs/search",
    "docs-search",
    build_search_view(
        session=session,
        site="maas.io/docs",
        template_path="docs/search.html"
        search_engine_id="xxxxxxxxxx" # Optional argument, required by some of our sites
    )
)

The template

You need to create an HTML template at the specificed template_path. By default this will be search.html inside your templates folder. This template will be passed the following data:

• {{ query }} - the contents of the q= search query parameter
• {{ start }} - the contents of the start= query parameter - the offset at which to start returning results (used for pagination - default 0)
• {{ num }} - the contents of the num= query parameter - the number of search results to return (default 10)
• {{ results }} - the results returned from the Google Custom Search query. The actual search results are in {{ results.entries }}.

The API key

You then need to provide the API key for the Google Custom Search API as an environment variable called SEARCH_API_KEY when the server starts - e.g.:

SEARCH_API_KEY=xxxxx FLASK_APP=app.py flask run

Once this is done, you should be able to visit /search?q={some_query} in your site and see search results built with your search.html template.

For some sites, you will need to pass a specific search engine ID (cx) to the build_search_view which you will find in the Custom Search Engine page.

New sites

If you created a new site and the API is not returning any results, you may need to add it to the Google Custom Search Engine list of sites. If you don't see any sites in this page, ask the Webteam.