How to Delete Taxonomies from Algolia

At Geekflare, I use Algolia for search, and while testing a few things around Polylang for translation, I noticed translated posts started appearing on the search results.

This was unpleasant, and we needed to find a way to delete these records from Algolia.

When I logged into the Algolia dashboard, I could see translated posts have taxonomies as Francais.

But there is no way to delete records from the dashboard. Algolia’s dashboard is minimal; they recommend using their API to manage the records.

After some research, I found a way to delete these entries. You can use cURL or an HTTP client like Postman.

You need the following details as a prerequisite:

• Algolia application ID
• Admin API key
• Index name

The above details are under Settings >> API Keys on the Algolia dashboard.

First, let’s query to confirm you are getting expected records to ensure you don’t delete something else.

curl -X POST \
     -H "X-Algolia-API-Key: ADMIN_API_KEY" \
     -H "X-Algolia-Application-Id: APPLICATION_ID" \
     "https://APPLICATION_ID.algolia.net/1/indexes/INDEX_NAME/query" \
     --data '{"query": "", "filters": "taxonomies.language: Français"}'

Don’t forget to replace ADMIN_API_KEY, APPLICATION_ID, INDEX_NAME with your actual ones.

The above query was able to return the desired records. Now, I am confident to delete the records by using the below query.

curl -X POST \
     -H "X-Algolia-API-Key: ADMIN_API_KEY" \
     -H "X-Algolia-Application-Id: APPLICATION_ID" \
     "https://APPLICATION_ID.algolia.net/1/indexes/INDEX_NAME/deleteByQuery" \
     --data '{"query": "", "filters": "taxonomies.language: Français"}'

If you decide to use Postman, you can add the below headers.

• X-Algolia-Application-Id
• X-Algolia-API-Key

And, here is the successful results.

My requirement was to delete taxonomies but through Algolia API you can manage pretty much everything. You can explore the official delete records API reference for more ideas.