MeiliSearch
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⚡ Ultra relevant and instant full-text search API 🔍
MeiliSearch is a powerful, fast, open-source, easy to use and deploy search engine. Both searching and indexing are highly customizable. Features such as typo-tolerance, filters, and synonyms are provided out-of-the-box. For more information about features go to our documentation.
Meili helps the Rust community find crates on crates.meilisearch.com
Features
- Search as-you-type experience (answers < 50 milliseconds)
- Full-text search
- Typo tolerant (understands typos and miss-spelling)
- Supports Kanji
- Supports Synonym
- Easy to install, deploy, and maintain
- Whole documents are returned
- Highly customizable
- RESTful API
Get started
Deploy the Server
Run it using Docker
docker run -it -p 7700:7700 --rm getmeili/meilisearch
Installing with Homebrew
brew update && brew install meilisearch
meilisearch
Installing with APT
echo "deb [trusted=yes] https://apt.fury.io/meilisearch/ /" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/fury.list
apt update && apt install meilisearch-http
meilisearch
Download the binary
curl -L https://install.meilisearch.com | sh
./meilisearch
Run it on heroku
Compile and run it from sources
If you have the Rust toolchain already installed on your local system, clone the repository and change it to your working directory. In the cloned repository, compile MeiliSearch.
git clone https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch.git
cd MeiliSearch
cargo run --release
Create an Index and Upload Some Documents
Let's create an index! If you need a sample dataset, use this movie database. You can also find it in the datasets/
directory.
curl -L 'https://bit.ly/2PAcw9l' -o movies.json
MeiliSearch can serve multiple indexes, with different kinds of documents. It is required to create an index before sending documents to it.
curl -i -X POST 'http://127.0.0.1:7700/indexes' --data '{ "name": "Movies", "uid": "movies" }'
Now that the server knows about your brand new index, you're ready to send it some data.
curl -i -X POST 'http://127.0.0.1:7700/indexes/movies/documents' \
--header 'content-type: application/json' \
--data-binary @movies.json
Search for Documents
In command line
The search engine is now aware of your documents and can serve those via a HTTP server.
The jq
command-line tool can greatly help you read the server responses.
curl 'http://127.0.0.1:7700/indexes/movies/search?q=botman+robin&limit=2' | jq
{
"hits": [
{
"id": "415",
"title": "Batman & Robin",
"poster": "https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w1280/79AYCcxw3kSKbhGpx1LiqaCAbwo.jpg",
"overview": "Along with crime-fighting partner Robin and new recruit Batgirl...",
"release_date": "1997-06-20",
},
{
"id": "411736",
"title": "Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders",
"poster": "https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w1280/GW3IyMW5Xgl0cgCN8wu96IlNpD.jpg",
"overview": "Adam West and Burt Ward returns to their iconic roles of Batman and Robin...",
"release_date": "2016-10-08",
}
],
"offset": 0,
"limit": 2,
"processingTimeMs": 1,
"query": "botman robin"
}
Use the Web Interface
We also deliver an out-of-the-box web interface in which you can test MeiliSearch interactively.
You can access the web interface in your web browser at the root of the server. The default URL is http://127.0.0.1:7700. All you need to do is open your web browser and enter MeiliSearch’s address to visit it. This will lead you to a web page with a search bar that allows you to search in a given set of documents.
Documentation
Now that your MeiliSearch server is up and running, you can learn more about how to tune your search engine in the documentation.
How it works
MeiliSearch uses LMDB as the internal key-value store. The key-value store allows to handle updates and queries with small memory and CPU overheads. The whole ranking system is data oriented and ensures great performances.
You can read this document if you want to dive deeper into the engine. The whole process of generating updates and handling queries is described in it. Besides, to learn the default rules used for sorting documents, you can take a look at this typos and ranking rules explanation.
Technical features
- Provides 6 default ranking criteria used to bucket sort documents
- Accepts custom criteria and can apply them in any custom order
- Supports ranged queries, useful for paginating results
- Can distinct and filter returned documents based on context defined rules
- Searches for concatenated and splitted query words to improve the search quality.
- Can store complete documents or only user schema specified fields
- The default tokenizer can index Latin and Kanji based languages
- Returns the matching text areas, useful to highlight matched words in results
- Accepts query time search config like the searchable attributes
- Supports runtime incremental indexing
Performances
When processing a dataset composed of 100 353 documents with 352 attributes each and 3 of them indexed, which means more than 300 000 fields indexed for 35 million stored, MeiliSearch is able to carry out more than 2.8k req/sec with an average response time of 9 ms on an Intel i7-7700 (8) @ 4.2GHz.
Requests are made using wrk and scripted to simulate real users' queries.
Running 10s test @ http://localhost:2230
2 threads and 25 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 9.52ms 7.61ms 99.25ms 84.58%
Req/Sec 1.41k 119.11 1.78k 64.50%
28080 requests in 10.01s, 7.42MB read
Requests/sec: 2806.46
Transfer/sec: 759.17KB
We also indexed a dataset containing about 12 millions cities names in 24 minutes on a 8 cores, 64 GB of RAM, and a 300 GB NMVe SSD machine.
The size of the resulting database reached 16 GB and search results were presented between 30 ms and 4 seconds for short prefix queries.
Notes
In Rust 1.32, the allocator has been changed to use the system allocator. We observed significant performance improvements when using jemalloc as the global allocator.
Contributing
Hey! We're glad you're thinking about contributing to MeiliSearch! If you think something is missing or could be improved, please open issues and pull requests. If you'd like to help this project grow, we'd love to have you! To start contributing, checking issues tagged as "good-first-issue" is a good start!
Analytic Events
Once a day, events are being sent to our Amplitude instance so we can know how many people are using MeiliSearch.
Only information concerning the platform on which the server runs is concerned. No other information is being sent.
If this doesn't suit you, you can disable these analytics by using the MEILI_NO_ANALYTICS
env variable.