Customizing Meilisearch settings

When using Meilisearch, sane defaults are used to connect and create an index. These defaults can be customized.

Most customizations can be done by adding values to the extra field of a row of the site_search_configs table. This field must be either null or contain valid JSON.

##Using an alternative URL

When using the Meilisearch driver, we'll try to connect to http://localhost:7700 by default.

You can customize this by adding a meilisearch.url JSON value to the extra attribute in the site_search_configs table. Here's how that would look like:

{"meilisearch":{"url":"https:\/\/your-custom-domain-and-port.com:1234"}}

##Modifying index settings

A Meilisearch index has various interesting settings that allow you which fields are searchable, specify ranking rules, and even add synonyms.

Every time a site is crawled, a new index is created. You can customize the settings that are used for this index in two ways.

The first way would be by adding a meilisearch.indexSettings JSON value to the extra attribute in the site_search_configs. In meilisearch.indexSettings you can put any of the list settings that Meilisearch provides.

Here's how that value you would put in extra if you only want results based on the url and description fields in the index.

{
    "meilisearch": {
        "indexSettings": {
            "searchableAttributes": [
                "url",
                "description"
            ]
        }
    }
}

Here's another example where we are going to add a synonym for the word "computer". You can read more about how synonyms can be configured in the Meilisearch docs.

{
   "meilisearch":{
      "indexSettings":{
         "synonyms":{
            "Macintosh":[
               "computer"
            ]
         }
      }
   }
}

The second way to customize index settings would be by leveraging the Spatie\SiteSearch\Events\NewIndexCreatedEvent. This event is fired whenever a new index is created. It has two properties:

• the name of the created Meilisearch object
• an instance of Spatie\SiteSearch\Models\SiteSearchConfig

You can use these properties to make an API call of your own to Meilisearch to customize any of the available settings.