Please add a search bar to the AWS CDK API Reference site

[bionicles]

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/api/latest/docs/aws-construct-library.html

There's no search bar on the CDK API reference docs

Would it be possible to add a search bar?

Then customers can easily find stacks and more people will help develop CDK

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This is a 📕 documentation issue

[1oglop1]

+1 It's really difficult to navigate documentation without fulltext search

[rehanvdm]

+1 I received the request a few times already when showing the CDK API docs to beginners.

[a-h]

Looking at the HTML source code for the CDK documentation site, it's generated with Docusaurus which has search capabilities.

• https://docusaurus.io/docs/search

I'm not sure of the reasoning around the effort/large tag ( perhaps a proposed solution made it large effort, or maybe Docusaurus didn't have search capabilities in the past), because it's not documented in any notes on this issue.

However, since Algolia is well supported by Docusaurus, enabling search seems fairly straightforward.

If there's risk about customer impact, it would be something that could be A/B tested in production for a week to see how it performs, and to collect feedback about the quality of results.

[guidobit]

It would be nice to have an querystring search param, which can be used for things like DuckDuckGo !bangs or browser/ide search integration.

[makemefeelgr8]

Lemme demonstrate ya my use case. Let's say there's a CDK feature called ApplicationListenerRule I'm interested in. So, I open CDK v2 API docs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/api/v2/docs/aws-construct-library.html

Where do I type ApplicationListenerRule in to get more info about it? I've tried using CTRL+F but it doesn't find the thing I need. Really? How come there's no search field in API reference?

Lemme just show ya how your competitors do it: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/ Guys from Microsoft made not just 1, but 2 search fields! The 1st one allows you to search the whole website, while the 2nd one allows you to quickly filter categories by title.

Come on guys! I totally love the CDK and the stuff you do. But that CDK API page definitely needs some love. You could just slap a Filter by title field at the very least. I bet it can be done in an hour or two. Thanks!

Oh, and this issue is extremely important right now, cause cdk v2 is out of beta. Everyone's migrating theirs stuff and trying to figure out how to replace all the deprecated code.

[zackmckenna]

• 1 this is really painful. I'll be onboarding some devs and I can see this being an issue. Searching google is more effective but often takes you to v1 docs.

[makemefeelgr8]

It's been 2 years since this issue was opened... and it have not even been addressed. Kind of hard to believe something as trivial as adding a search field can take so much time. There must be something terribly wrong with your business processes, guys. Amazon is getting tons of money. I'm being charged for every CPU cycle and every byte of memory. And still- you don't even care about your developers in the slightest. I wonder, where do all these money end up in? How come I can't even search the docs? I've opened the API reference- what am I supposed to do next? What's the typical usecase? Should I spend hours on opening all 1000 pages one by one until I find what I need? Google search does not work- it leads to outdated cdk v1 docs. Docs website is literally unusable. Come on, guys, do something about it! Please!

[ryuheechul]

I also finally reached to the point of having to come up with a workaround and this is what I did.

# install https://retype.com/
yarn global add retypeapp

# clone this repo 
gh repo clone aws/aws-cdk

# cd to actual source code directory
cd aws-cdk/packages/@aws-cdk

# retype will do the magic
retype watch

Mind that filter on the left is not a search function. Search is on the top right. Also this is only an arbitrary workaround and may come with whatever downside of doing so and I hope the navigation on the official site becomes better soon.

[avrobin]

I need this, looks like Amazon is intentionally saying no (or at least 'we don't think it's of dear import) --- weird.

[0-sv]

This is not an answer and hopefully this will be added one day, but in the meantime I use a site: query in google or kagi.

[AussieWarren]

This makes it practically impossible to use the documentation by itself unless I already know what I'm doing and exactly what I'm looking for, which defeats part of the purpose of documentation. Is everyone just supposed to manually open everything? @rix0rrr @SomayaB What's going on with this? How can you publish an API reference with no search feature and leave it that way for 3 years with no updates?

[makemefeelgr8]

3 years with no updates

Sadly, guys from Amazon don't really care about developers. I believe they will do nothing in next 3 years as well. I switched to Azure a long time ago, and never looked back.

[brschwalm]

+1. Are you kidding? This is basic functionality. Please consider your users.

[cj-askar-ibragimov]

COME OOOON!

[guidobit]

Perhaps to make this a bit more constructive, are there any pointers on how this used to work? Perhaps the community can try to implement this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210904094247/https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/api/latest/typescript/api/index.html This was the search previously, it used to work with DocFx, but the search was removed when the Typescript documentation was removed. I remember it was quite helpful when learning CDK to be able to type "Domain" and see which packages had constructs with the name domain in it.

[mgrogg-signpost]

Bump. It's very painful trying to find anything without a basic search bar on the API documentation.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has received a significant amount of attention so we are automatically upgrading its priority. A member of the community will see the re-prioritization and provide an update on the issue.