MeiliSearch Strapi Plugin

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⚡ The MeiliSearch plugin for Strapi

MeiliSearch is an open-source search engine. Discover what MeiliSearch is!

Add your Strapi collections into a MeiliSearch instance. The plugin listens to modifications made on your collections and updates MeiliSearch accordingly.

Table of Contents

• 📖 Documentation
• 🔧 Installation
• 🎬 Getting Started
• 💡 Run the Playground
• 🤖 Compatibility with MeiliSearch and Strapi
• ⚙️ Development Workflow and Contributing
• 🌎 Community support
• 🤩 Just for the pleasure of the eyes

📖 Documentation

To understand MeiliSearch and how it works, see the MeiliSearch's documentation.

To understand Strapi and how to create an app, see Strapi's documentation.

🔧 Installation

Inside your Strapi app, add the package:

With npm:

npm install strapi-plugin-meilisearch

With yarn:

yarn add strapi-plugin-meilisearch

To apply the plugin to Strapi, a re-build is needed:

strapi build

You will need both a running Strapi app and a running MeiliSearch instance. For specific version compatibility see this section.

🏃‍♀️ Run MeiliSearch

There are many easy ways to download and run a MeiliSearch instance.

For example, if you use Docker:

docker pull getmeili/meilisearch:latest # Fetch the latest version of MeiliSearch image from Docker Hub
docker run -it --rm -p 7700:7700 getmeili/meilisearch:latest ./meilisearch --master-key=masterKey

🏃‍♂️ Run Strapi

If you don't have a running Strapi project yet, you can either launch the playground present in this project or create a Strapi project.

We recommend adding your collections in development mode to allow the server reloads needed to apply hooks.

strapi develop
// or
yarn develop

🎬 Getting Started

Now that you have installed the plugin, a running meiliSearch instance and, a running Strapi app, let's go to the plugin page on your admin dashboard.

On the left-navbar, MeiliSearch appears under the PLUGINS category. If it does not, ensure that you have installed the plugin and re-build Strapi (see installation).

🤫 Add Credentials

First, you need to configure credentials via the strapi config, or on the plugin page.

Using the plugin page

You can add you MeiliSearch credentials in the upper box of the MeiliSearch plugin page.

For example, using the credentials from the section above: Run MeiliSearch, the following screen shows where the information should be.

Once completed, click on the add button.

Using a config file

To use the strapi config add the following to config/plugins.js or config/[NODE_ENV]/plugin.js:

module.exports = () => ({
  //...
  meilisearch: {
    // Your meili host
    host: "http://localhost:7700"
    // Your master key
    api_key: "masterKey",
  }
  //...
})

Using config/[NODE_ENV]/plugin.js, it is possible to have a config file for different environments.

Note that if you use both method, the config file overwrites the credentials added through the plugin page.

🚛 Add your collections to MeiliSearch

If you don't have any collection yet in your Strapi Plugin, please follow Strapi quickstart.

We will use, as example, the collections provided by Strapi's quickstart.

On your plugin homepage, you should have two collections appearing: restaurant and category.

By clicking on the left checkbox, the collection is automatically indexed in MeiliSearch. For example, if you click on the restaurant checkbox, all your restaurants are now available in MeiliSearch. We will see in start searching how to try it out.

🪝 Apply Hooks

Hooks are listeners that update MeiliSearch each time you add/update/delete an entry in your collections. To activate them, you will have to reload the server. If you are in develop mode, click on the red Reload Server button. If not, reload the server manually!

🕵️‍♀️ Start Searching

Once you have a collection containing documents indexed in MeiliSearch, you can start searching.

To search in MeiliSearch, you can use the instant-meilisearch library that integrates a whole search interface, or our meilisearch-js SDK.

⚡️ Using Instant meiliSearch

You can have a front up and running in record time with instant-meilisearch.

In Instant MeiliSearch, you only have to provide your credentials and index name (uid). restaurant is the index name in our example.

You can have a quick preview with the following code in an HTML file. Create an HTML file, copy-paste the code below and open the file in your browser (or find it in /front_examples/restaurant.html).

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@meilisearch/instant-meilisearch/templates/basic_search.css" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="wrapper">
      <div id="searchbox" focus></div>
      <div id="hits"></div>
    </div>
    <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@meilisearch/instant-meilisearch/dist/instant-meilisearch.umd.min.js"></script>
    <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/instantsearch.js@4"></script>
    <script>
        const search = instantsearch({
            indexName: "restaurant",
            searchClient: instantMeiliSearch(
                "http://localhost:7700"
            )
            });

            search.addWidgets([
              instantsearch.widgets.searchBox({
                  container: "#searchbox"
              }),
              instantsearch.widgets.configure({ hitsPerPage: 8 }),
              instantsearch.widgets.hits({
                  container: "#hits",
                  templates: {
                  item: `
                      <div>
                      <div class="hit-name">
                          {{#helpers.highlight}}{ "attribute": "name" }{{/helpers.highlight}}
                      </div>
                      </div>
                  `
                  }
              })
            ]);
            search.start();
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

💛 Using MeiliSearch for JS

You can also use meilisearch-js to communicate with MeiliSearch.

The following code is a setup that will output a restaurant after a search.

import { MeiliSearch } from 'meilisearch'

;(async () => {
  const client = new MeiliSearch({
    host: 'http://127.0.0.1:7700',
    apiKey: 'masterKey',
  })

  // An index is where the documents are stored.
  const response = client.index('movies').search('Biscoutte')
})()

response content:

{
  "hits": [
    {
      "id": 3,
      "name": "Biscotte Restaurant",
      "description": "Welcome to Biscotte restaurant! Restaurant Biscotte offers a cuisine based on fresh, quality products, often local, organic when possible, and always produced by passionate producers.",
      "categories": []
    }
  ],
  "offset": 0,
  "limit": 20,
  "nbHits": 1,
  "exhaustiveNbHits": false,
  "processingTimeMs": 1,
  "query": "biscoutte"
}

💡 Run the Playground

Instead of adding the plugin to an existing project, you can try it out using the playground in this project.

# Root of repository
yarn playground:dev

This command will install the required dependencies and launch the app in development mode. You should be able to reach it on the port 8000 of your localhost.

🤖 Compatibility with MeiliSearch and Strapi

Supported Strapi versions:

Complete installation requirements are the same as for Strapi itself and can be found in the documentation under installation Requirements.

• Strapi v3.6.x

(This plugin may work with the older Strapi versions, but these are not tested nor officially supported at this time.)

Supported MeiliSearch versions:

This package only guarantees the compatibility with the version v0.20.0 of MeiliSearch.

Node / NPM versions:

• NodeJS >= 12.10 <= 14
• NPM >= 6.x

We recommend always using the latest version of Strapi to start your new projects.

⚙️ Development Workflow and Contributing

Any new contribution is more than welcome in this project!

If you want to know more about the development workflow or want to contribute, please visit our contributing guidelines for detailed instructions!

🌎 Community support

• For general help using MeiliSearch, please refer to the official MeiliSearch documentation.
• Contact the MeiliSearch support
• Strapi community Slack
• For general help using Strapi, please refer to the official Strapi documentation.

🤩 Just for the pleasure of the eyes

Using the foodadvisor restaurant demo Strapi provided. We added a searchbar to it using instant-meilisearch.