Use Discourse as a Content Source

This article outlines how to crawl and index your data hosted on a Discourse platform.

PERMISSIONS.

SearchUnify ignores user permissions during searches. All indexed files can be search by all users.

Establish a Connection

  1. Navigate to Content Sources.

  2. Click Add New Content Source.

  1. Find Discourse in the Others category and click Add.

  2. Give your content source a Name.
  3. Enter the web address of your Discourse instance in Client URL.
  4. Select the language of discussions, emails, and other data. It is possible to select more than one languages.
  5. Pick an Authentication Method:
    1. No Authentication. Only the publicly available data is indexed.
    2. API Key. This method of authentication has been planned and will be introduced soon. Two new fields appear when you pick this option. The fields are API Username and API Key.

Set Up Crawl Frequency

The first crawl is always manual and is performed after configuring the content source. In Choose A Date, select a date to start crawling; the data created after the selected date will be crawled. For now, keep the frequency to its default value Never and click Set and move to the next section.

NOTE.

Frequency crawl works from the second crawl onwards. For the first time, always set Frequency to Never and start a crawl from the Actions column on the Content Sources screen.

Select Types and Fields for Indexing

Discourse has only one object, topics. SearchUnify can index it and all the fields inside topics.

  1. Click to select content fields.

  2. Click Apply.

  3. Press Save.

After the First Crawl

Return to the Content Sources screen and click in Actions. The number of indexed documents is updated after the crawl is complete. You can view crawl progress in in Actions. Documentation on crawl progress is in View Crawl Logs.

NOTE 1

Review the settings in Rules if there is no progress in Crawl Logs.

NOTE 2

For Mamba '22 and newer instances, search isn't impacted during a crawl. However, in older instances, some documents remain inaccessible while a crawl is going on.

Once the first crawl is complete, click in Actions open the content source for editing, and set a crawl frequency.

  1. In Choose a Date, click to fire up a calendar and select a date. Only the data after the selected date is indexed.

  2. Use the Frequency dropdown to select how often SearchUnify should index the data. For illustration, the frequency has been set to Weekly and Tuesday has been chosen as the crawling day. Whenever the Frequency is other than Never, a third dropdown appears where you can specify the interval. Also, whenever Frequency is set to Hourly, then manual crawls are disabled.

  3. Click Set to save crawl frequency settings. On clicking Set, you are taken to the Rules tab.

Last updatedFriday, March 29, 2024

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