README

A Meilisearch engine adapter for silvershop-suite/search: typo-tolerant, relevance-ranked product search, as a drop-in replacement for the built-in database backend.

Requirements

silvershop-suite/search ^1 (the search framework)
A reachable Meilisearch server (self-hosted — a single binary)

Running Meilisearch

Meilisearch is a single binary — download it (docs):

curl -L https://install.meilisearch.com | sh   # downloads ./meilisearch

For anything beyond a quick local test, run it under systemd. A system service (/etc/systemd/system/meilisearch.service):

[Unit]
Description=Meilisearch
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=meilisearch
Environment=MEILI_MASTER_KEY=change-me-to-a-long-random-key
Environment=MEILI_ENV=production
Environment=MEILI_DB_PATH=/var/lib/meilisearch/data
Environment=MEILI_HTTP_ADDR=127.0.0.1:7700
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/meilisearch
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now meilisearch

No root? A per-user service works too — put the unit in ~/.config/systemd/user/meilisearch.service (use %h/... paths and ExecStart=%h/meilisearch), then:

systemctl --user enable --now meilisearch
sudo loginctl enable-linger "$USER"   # one-time: start it at boot without logging in

Keep Meilisearch bound to localhost (behind your app) and use a long random MEILI_MASTER_KEY in production.

Installation

composer require silvershop-suite/search-meilisearch

Point it at your Meilisearch and make it the active backend:

# .env
SS_MEILISEARCH_HOST="http://127.0.0.1:7700"
SS_MEILISEARCH_KEY="your-master-or-api-key"

# app/_config/search.yml
SilverShop\Search\Backend\BackendRegistry:
  active_backend: 'meilisearch'

Then build the index:

sake tasks:meilisearch-reindex

Run dev/build?flush=1 first so the config + extension load.

How it works

Products are indexed on publish and removed on unpublish / delete (ProductSyncExtension), and the meilisearch-reindex task does a full (re)build plus pushes the index settings.
A search runs against Meilisearch and returns the matching products in Meili's relevance order; the SearchPage controller paginates them as usual — no change to silvershop-suite/search.
Indexed fields: Title, InternalItemID (SKU), Model, Content (searchable, weighted in that order) and BasePrice / CreatedTimestamp / Title (sortable). You get typo-tolerance, relevance ranking and instant-search speed out of the box — the gaps the DB backend has.
A search-engine outage never blocks publishing (sync is guarded); run the reindex task to repair any drift.

Facets

All registered facets (category / price / brand / rating / colour / attributes / stock) work unchanged with the Meilisearch backend: Meili does the typo-tolerant text match + ranking, then silvershop-suite/search's facet framework applies the selected filters and counts options over the matched products. No per-facet configuration needed.

Relevance & synonyms

Field weighting — free-text matches rank by field importance: Title, then SKU (InternalItemID), Model, Content. Reorder via config:

SilverShop\Search\Meilisearch\MeilisearchBackend:
  searchable_attributes: [Title, InternalItemID, Model, Content]

Synonyms — edit them in the CMS at Settings → Shop → Search synonyms: one group per line, comma-separated (e.g. tv, television, telly). Every term in a group matches the others. Saving pushes them to Meilisearch immediately — no reindex needed.

Typo tolerance — the minimum word length before a typo is tolerated. Meilisearch's own defaults (oneTypo 5, twoTypos 9) give short terms zero tolerance, so a 4-letter query like iPad would never reach iPod. The module lowers the one-typo threshold to 4 so short-word typos match. Tune per key via config (run the reindex task, or re-save synonyms, to push it):

SilverShop\Search\Meilisearch\MeilisearchBackend:
  min_word_size_for_typos:
    oneTypo: 4
    twoTypos: 7

Instant search (autocomplete)

A JSON endpoint for typeahead lives at /<your search page>/instant?q=… (e.g. /search/instant?q=tshi). It returns the top matches fast, for a theme to render a suggestions dropdown:

{"query":"tshi","results":[{"title":"T-Shirt","link":"/shop/apparel/t-shirt/","price":"$25.00","image":"/…"}]}

Limit via config:

SilverShop\Search\Meilisearch\MeilisearchBackend:
  instant_limit: 8

Roadmap

Native Meilisearch facetDistribution (a performance optimisation for very large catalogs).

License

BSD-3-Clause. See LICENSE.

Credits

Built and maintained by Remy Vaartjes (remy@xd.nl) — part of the SilverShop-Suite.

silvershop-suite / search-meilisearch

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