Connect Orama Cloud to a REST API

Another way to use Orama and get your data indexed is to import the data using your own REST API.

In this example I will be using a project I created that already has an API endpoint at: https://letsplayretro.games/api/nes/all, this particular endpoint gather all the games for the original Nintendo Entertainment System into one nice JSON structure.

To start indexing this data let's go into the dashboard and click on Add a new Index and then on HTTP Integrations:

You will then will be presented with a page that asks some questions about your new index and like the name and a description that is optional, in my case I named the index it NES Games but you may call it anything. After that is done you can click on REST API and we are ready to create our Index:

This page is where we will tell Orama the location of the Endpoint we want it to get the data from, and we want to use the data at https://letsplayretro.games/api/nes/all, in our case the endpoint does not require any authorization but if it did this where you could give us a header to send in the request.

The next step is to tell orama where our documents are in the Endpoint's JSON, if you open the endpoint you can see they are all in an array called games, so in our path we want to get everything inside of games, to represent that in JSONPath we write $.games.*.

Final step before we deploy our Index is to specify the properties that Orama should consider when performing a search. This doesn't mean that these properties will be the only ones returned, but rather that when searching for a specific term like "mario", Orama will only search within these properties. In our case, we only want to use the name property, which is a string. Let's add that and we will be ready to deploy our index:

After waiting a bit we should get back a success message and our API Key and Endpoint that we can use within our app.

That's it! We have deployed an index with a REST API datasource

Integrating Orama Cloud into your app

Now that you have your index deployed, you can start using it in your app.

Orama Cloud provides an official SDK for JavaScript that runs on every JavaScript runtime. You can use it to query your data.

To learn more about the SDK, check out the documentation.