@dune/plugin-meilisearch

Meilisearch-backed search engine for Dune CMS sites.

Drop-in replacement for Dune's built-in in-memory search engine. Implements the same SearchEngine interface — no changes to templates or route handlers. Swap in when you need:

• Typo tolerance and fuzzy matching
• Language-aware stemming and compound word handling
• Synonym expansion and stop words
• Persistent index across restarts
• Sub-millisecond queries at large corpus sizes (thousands of pages + PDFs)

Installation

Requires a running Meilisearch instance (v1.0+).

Add to your site's deno.json:

{
  "imports": {
    "@dune/plugin-meilisearch": "jsr:@dune/plugin-meilisearch",
    "@dune/plugin-meilisearch/engine": "jsr:@dune/plugin-meilisearch/engine"
  }
}

Usage

Pass the engine to Dune's bootstrap where a SearchEngine is expected:

import { createMeilisearchEngine } from "@dune/plugin-meilisearch/engine";

const search = createMeilisearchEngine({
  url: Deno.env.get("MEILI_URL") ?? "http://127.0.0.1:7700",
  apiKey: Deno.env.get("MEILI_API_KEY"),
  index: "content", // optional, default: "content"
}, pages); // your PageIndex[] from Dune

On build(), the engine:

1. Creates the Meilisearch index if it does not exist
2. Applies index settings (searchable/filterable attributes, ranking rules, typo tolerance)
3. Syncs all published pages as documents (delete-all then batch-put)

On rebuild(pages), the full sync runs again with the new page list — used automatically by dune dev on content changes.

Configuration

All options except url are optional.

createMeilisearchEngine({
  url: "http://127.0.0.1:7700",
  apiKey: "your-api-key",
  index: "content",
  excerptLength: 160, // characters in returned excerpts
  settings: {
    // Override any Meilisearch index settings
    stopWords: ["der", "die", "das", "und", "in"],
    synonyms: {
      "eu": ["europäische union", "europa"],
    },
    rankingRules: [
      "words",
      "typo",
      "proximity",
      "attribute",
      "sort",
      "exactness",
    ],
    typoTolerance: {
      enabled: true,
      minWordSizeForTypos: { oneTypo: 5, twoTypos: 9 },
    },
  },
}, pages);

Default index settings

Applied on every build() unless overridden:

Setting	Default
searchableAttributes	["title", "body", "tags"]
filterableAttributes	["template", "language", "tags"]
sortableAttributes	["date"]
rankingRules	words → typo → proximity → attribute → sort → exactness
typoTolerance	enabled, oneTypo ≥ 5 chars, twoTypos ≥ 9 chars

Custom facet fields

If your site uses system.search.facets in site.yaml (Dune's PageIndex.extra), those fields are automatically spread onto Meilisearch documents and available for filtering:

# site.yaml
system:
  search:
    facets:
      - field: subtype

With this config, subtype values (kurzinfo, buchbesprechung, etc.) are indexed and filterable via the standard Dune search API.

Document schema

Each Dune page is indexed as:

{
  id: string;       // stable ID derived from route
  route: string;    // e.g. "/articles/my-article"
  title: string;
  body: string;     // plain text body
  date: string | null;
  template: string;
  language: string;
  tags: string[];   // all taxonomy values flattened across vocabs
  // ...extra fields from PageIndex.extra
}

Running Meilisearch

The quickest way to get a local instance:

# Docker
docker run -d -p 7700:7700 getmeili/meilisearch:latest

# Or download the binary
curl -L https://install.meilisearch.com | sh
./meilisearch

For production, run Meilisearch as a systemd service on the same server as Dune and bind it to 127.0.0.1 only — no public exposure needed.

License

MIT