Meilisearch

Overview

Meilisearch provides full-text search for articles. It runs as a separate service in the Docker stack and is wired into Laravel through Scout (laravel/scout + meilisearch/meilisearch-php). Meilisearch handles relevance, typo-tolerance, and filtering, so PostgreSQL is no longer queried with ILIKE for search.

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Usage

Feature	Meilisearch Usage	Notes
Article full-text search	SCOUT_DRIVER=meilisearch	Title, content, excerpt, author, tags
Filterable attributes	searchableSettings()	is_active, published_at, category_id, school_id
Landing search + filter	Combined in one Meilisearch call	No re-filtering in SQL
Indexing	Via Redis queue (SCOUT_QUEUE=true)	Non-blocking writes

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Environment Variables

SCOUT_DRIVER=meilisearch
MEILISEARCH_HOST=http://127.0.0.1:7700
MEILISEARCH_KEY=...
SCOUT_PREFIX=
SCOUT_QUEUE=true

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Docker Compose

services:
  meilisearch:
    image: getmeili/meilisearch:v1.52.0
    environment:
      MEILI_MASTER_KEY: ${MEILISEARCH_KEY}
      MEILI_ENV: production
    ports:
      - "7700:7700"
    volumes:
      - meilisearch_data:/meili_data

Running without Docker Compose

docker run -d \
  --name sutomo-meilisearch \
  -p 7700:7700 \
  -v ~/meilisearch/data:/meili_data \
  -e MEILI_MASTER_KEY=sutomo-master-key-2026 \
  -e MEILI_ENV=development \
  getmeili/meilisearch:v1.52.0

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Model Integration

Article is made searchable via the HasSearchable concern:

// app/Models/News/Article/Concerns/HasSearchable.php
public function searchableSettings(): array
{
    return [
        'filterableAttributes' => [
            'is_active',
            'published_at',
            'category',
            'school',
            'category_id',
            'school_id',
        ],
    ];
}

Re-sync index settings

After changing searchableSettings(), apply them to the live index:

php artisan articles:sync-search-index

Re-import all articles

php artisan scout:import "App\Models\News\Article\Article"

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Key Files

File	Purpose
config/scout.php	Scout driver, Meilisearch host/key
app/Models/News/Article/Concerns/HasSearchable.php	Searchable shape + index settings
app/Console/Commands/SyncArticleSearchIndex.php	Apply filterable attributes
docker-compose.yml	Meilisearch service definition
.env	SCOUT_DRIVER, MEILISEARCH_*, SCOUT_QUEUE