Full-Text Search with MeiliSearch and Laravel Scout

It feels so long ago that Laravel Scout was introduced: a great tool that lets you easily implement full-text search on Eloquent models. At launch, Laravel Scout included an Algolia driver–a service that provides hosted full-text search on their own servers–and options to make custom drivers. As with many hosted SaaS offerings, Algolia takes away a lot of headaches for developers and allows most teams to deploy quicker.

There are times, however, that I want to play with full-text search without going through Algolia. I wanted the simplicity of Algolia that I could host on my own, but without the complexities that I found in other self-hosted tools like Elasticsearch. I found this tool in MeiliSearch.

MeiliSearch is a simple self-hosted full-text search solution that's easy to integrate into a Laravel application–their team even maintains a Laravel Scout driver!

I'd like to show you how easily you can set up a locally-hosted full-text search server and connect it to your Laravel application. In this example, I will use a fresh install of Laravel 8, and will configure the App\Models\User model to be searchable via MeiliSearch/Scout.

Install Laravel Scout

composer require laravel/scout

Publish Scout configuration

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Laravel\Scout\ScoutServiceProvider"

Add the Laravel\Scout\Searchable trait to your model

    <?php

    namespace App\Models;

    use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;
    use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\User as Authenticatable;
    use Illuminate\Notifications\Notifiable;
+   use Laravel\Scout\Searchable;

    class User extends Authenticatable
    {
-       use HasFactory, Notifiable;
+       use HasFactory, Notifiable, Searchable;

Install MeiliSearch Laravel Scout driver

composer require meilisearch/meilisearch-laravel-scout

Publish MeiliSearch configuration

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Meilisearch\Scout\MeilisearchServiceProvider" --tag="config"

Update .env

If you do not have a key set, be sure to leave the empty MEILISEARCH_KEY= value in your .env file

SCOUT_DRIVER=meilisearch
MEILISEARCH_HOST=http://127.0.0.1:7700
MEILISEARCH_KEY=

Run MeiliSearch

To make implementation into your local development environment easier, Tighten has included MeiliSearch as a service in Takeout. I highly recommend (completely biased) installing Takeout and starting a MeiliSearch service. Otherwise, you can follow the installation instructions on the MeiliSearch Documentation.

If you decide to use Takeout, you can run MeiliSearch with:

takeout enable meilisearch

Create a search index

❯ php artisan scout:index users
Index "users" created.

Import documents to populate the index

❯ php artisan scout:import "App\Models\User"
Imported [App\Models\User] models up to ID: 10
All [App\Models\User] records have been imported.

Search your models!

❯ php artisan tinker

>>> App\Models\User::search('Rach')->get();
=> Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection {#4219
     all: [
       App\Models\User {#4230
         id: 5,
         name: "Rachelle Anderson",
         email: "[email protected]",
         email_verified_at: "2020-10-20 15:13:09",
         created_at: "2020-10-20 15:13:09",
         updated_at: "2020-10-20 15:13:09",
       },
     ],
   }

Keep going

The MeiliSearch documentation is comprehensive and covers a lot more use cases than this post. I recommend reading the documentation if you want to harness the full power of this great tool.

Stay in touch

I hope you come to enjoy working with MeiliSearch as much as I have. If you have feedback or would just like to say hi, follow me @JoseCanHelp. 👋