meilisearch

Meilisearch

Meilisearch is a fast, typo-tolerant full-text search engine with a simple REST API.
It provides instant search results, faceted filtering, and relevancy tuning out of the box.

How Meilisearch works

flowchart LR
    App([Application]) -->|:7700| Meili[Meilisearch API]
    Meili --> Index[(Indexes / Documents)]
    User([User]) -->|search query| Meili
    Meili --> Results[Instant Results]

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1. Applications index documents by sending JSON payloads to the REST API.
2. Meilisearch builds optimized search indexes for instant retrieval.
3. Search queries return ranked, typo-tolerant results in milliseconds.
4. Faceted search, filtering, and sorting are supported natively.

Stack details in this repo

• Image: getmeili/meilisearch:v1.9
• Container name: meilisearch
• API endpoint: http://<host-ip>:7700
• Persistent data:
  • meili_data:/meili_data

Environment variables

Set via .env (copy from .env.example):

• MEILI_PORT (default: 7700)
• MEILI_MASTER_KEY (default: changeme) — API key for authentication
• MEILI_ENV (default: development) — set to production to enforce key auth

How to run

From the repository root:

cd meilisearch
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d

Test the API:

# Check health
curl http://localhost:7700/health

# Create an index and add documents
curl -X POST http://localhost:7700/indexes/movies/documents \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer changeme" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data-binary '[
    {"id": 1, "title": "The Matrix", "genre": "sci-fi"},
    {"id": 2, "title": "Inception", "genre": "sci-fi"},
    {"id": 3, "title": "Interstellar", "genre": "sci-fi"}
  ]'

# Search
curl "http://localhost:7700/indexes/movies/search?q=matrx" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer changeme"

Useful commands:

docker compose ps
docker compose logs -f
docker compose restart
docker compose down

Use it effectively

• Sample data is seeded automatically on docker compose up (the seed container indexes movies and exits).
• Run manual searches after startup:

# Search with typo tolerance
curl "http://localhost:7700/indexes/movies/search" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer changeme" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"q": "interstllar"}'

# Filter by genre
curl "http://localhost:7700/indexes/movies/search" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer changeme" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"q": "", "filter": "genre = action"}'

• Use the SDKs (JavaScript, Python, Go, PHP, etc.) for easy integration.
• Configure searchable attributes, ranking rules, and stop words per index.
• Enable faceted search for category/filter UIs.
• Use MEILI_ENV=production in production to require API key authentication on all endpoints.

Notes

• Change the default master key before exposing externally.
• In development mode, the API is accessible without authentication for convenience.
• Data persists across restarts via the meili_data volume.
• See Meilisearch docs for full API and configuration reference.