Add a Push source

This is for:

Developer System Administrator

Coveo has dedicated connectors for many web and on-premises systems, letting you quickly make application content searchable. See the connector directory for the full list.

However, you may want to index the content of applications that don’t have a dedicated connector. In such cases, the Push source is one of the generic sources to consider for making the desired content searchable with Coveo.

For example, let’s say you have an on-premises content management system (CMS) developed in-house. With a push approach, one of your developers could create a crawler to retrieve this content and push it to your Coveo organization using the Push API. As the name suggests, this indexing approach involves only outbound calls from your infrastructure, with no inbound calls from the Coveo Platform. But before pushing content to your Coveo organization, you must create a Push source to receive the content.

Architecture diagram of Coveo’s push indexing components

The following diagram shows the main interactions between a custom crawler, the Push API, the indexing pipeline, a Push source, and the other components involved in this process.

Diagram showing Push API interactions | Coveo

Source key characteristics

Features Supported Additional information

Content update operations

All content update operations are triggered by Push API calls.

Content security options

Same users and groups as in your content system

check

Specific users and groups

check

Everyone

check

metadata indexing for search

Automapping of metadata to a field with a matching name

Enabled by default.

Automatically indexed metadata

Sample of autopopulated fields (no user-defined metadata required):

Sample of autopopulated fields (API call parameter of matching name required):

  • author

  • title
     

After adding or updating items, inspect your item field values in the Content Browser.

Collected indexable metadata

Parameters specified in API call payloads that don’t match an existing field name are collected, but not indexed.

After adding or updating items, review the View and map metadata subpage for the list of indexed metadata and to index additional metadata from those available.

Add a Push source

Follow the instructions below to add a Push source.

  1. On the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, click Add source.

  2. In the Add a source of content panel, click the Push source tile.

  3. Configure your source.

Tip
Leading practice

It’s best to create or edit your source in your sandbox organization first. Once you’ve confirmed that it indexes the desired content, you can copy your source configuration to your production organization, either with a snapshot or manually.

See About non-production organizations for more information and best practices regarding sandbox organizations.

"Configuration" tab

On the Add a Push source page, the Configuration tab is selected by default. It contains your source’s general and authentication information, as well as other parameters.

General information

Source name

Enter a name for your source.

Tip
Leading practice

A source name can’t be modified once it’s saved, therefore be sure to use a short and descriptive name, using letters, numbers, hyphens (-), and underscores (_). Avoid spaces and other special characters.

When coding a crawler to push content in this source, a developer will need this name to get the corresponding sourceId.

Push API URL

This field, available only after source creation, contains the URL you must use to add and update an item in your source in the following format:

Primay region URL

US

https://api.cloud.coveo.com/push/v1/organizations/<ORGANIZATION_ID>/sources/<SOURCE_ID>/documents

Canada

https://api-ca.cloud.coveo.com/push/v1/organizations/<ORGANIZATION_ID>/sources/<SOURCE_ID>/documents

Europe

https://api-eu.cloud.coveo.com/push/v1/organizations/<ORGANIZATION_ID>/sources/<SOURCE_ID>/documents

Australia

https://api-au.cloud.coveo.com/push/v1/organizations/<ORGANIZATION_ID>/sources/<SOURCE_ID>/documents

The URL that you can Copy to clipboard contains your <ORGANIZATION_ID> and <SOURCE_ID>, which are required parameters for all operations regarding your source. See the Item section in Push API to test API calls.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

If you want Coveo to extract text from image files or PDF files containing images, enable the appropriate option.

The extracted text is processed as item data, meaning that it’s fully searchable and will appear in the item Quick view. See Enable optical character recognition for details on this feature.

API key

When you create the source, we recommend also creating an API key with appropriate privileges to authorize a process and send information to the source. This option is available at source creation only.

Note

This option isn’t visible if you don’t have the Edit API keys privilege.
Important

The Your API Key dialog appears only once and is the only place where you can see and copy the key value.

If you fail to copy the key value, the workaround is to manually create a new API key as follows:

  • Select the Custom access level for the Sources privileges of the Content service. Then, in the dropdown of available sources, select Edit access level for the targeted source and View access level for the other sources.

  • Select the View access level for the Organization privileges of the Organization service.

In this case, you should also disable or delete the original unused API key.
Project

If you have the Enterprise edition, use the Project selector to associate your source with one or multiple Coveo projects.

"Content Security" tab

Select who will be able to access the source items through a Coveo-powered search interface. For details on this parameter, see Content security.

Note

If you select Same users and groups as in your content system, your crawler process must push item permissions along with the content (see Manage security identities in a security identity provider and Manage items and permissions in a Push source).

"Access" tab

In the Access tab, set whether each group (and API key, if applicable) in your Coveo organization can view or edit the current source.

For example, when creating a new source, you could decide that members of Group A can edit its configuration while Group B can only view it.

See Custom access level for more information.

Required privileges

You can assign privileges to allow access to specific tools in the Coveo Administration Console. The following table indicates the privileges required to view or edit elements of the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page and associated panels. See Manage privileges and Privilege reference for more information.

Note

The Edit all privilege isn’t required to create sources. When granting privileges for the Sources domain, you can grant a group or API key the View all or Custom access level, instead of Edit all, and then select the Can Create checkbox to allow users to create sources. See Can Create ability dependence for more information.
Actions Service Domain Required access level

View sources, view source update schedules, and subscribe to source notifications

Content

Fields

View

Sources

Organization

Organization

Edit sources, edit source update schedules, and view the View and map metadata subpage

Content

Fields

Edit

Sources

Content

Source metadata

View

Organization

Organization

What’s next?

  1. If your Push source is secured, create a security identity provider.

  2. Create the fields you need in your index.

    Remember, any metadata you push to your source is automatically mapped to an existing field with the same name. For example, if your Coveo organization has a version field, version metadata values in the items you push to your source will automatically populate this field.

    Important

  3. Use the Push API to push content to your source.