Scout Search

clarkwinkelmann

fakruzaruret I'm not sure what you mean.

The 3 drivers I've tested so far are Flarum native search, Meilisearch and TNTSearch. I have still not tested Algolia myself despite the extension supporting it.

I didn't see much of a difference between Flarum native and TNTSearch. I tried TNTSearch negative keyword syntax and tried searching sentences but it doesn't seem to work. It just works with simple keywords, much like Flarum native search.

Meilisearch is still my favorite solution so far, it works great and is incredible at searching for partial words and wrong spellings. I have not had an opportunity to use it in production yet, but I'm hoping to install it on one of my forums later this year.

CyberGene

I've been using Meilisearch through this extension for some time now and I'm very happy with it. The only thing is I have to pay €7 a month for the DigitalOcean droplet and while that's not much, I'm still not sure if it's worth it over the Flarum native search. I'll have to check with my users about how often they use the search functionality but it seems they don't care a lot and don't use it too much, so I may switch to Flarum native again unless I find cheaper Meilisearch solution since my current needs are just too tiny to justify even €7 a month.

clarkwinkelmann

CyberGene where are you hosting your forum? You might be able to place Flarum and Meilisearch on the same server to save on cost.

Meilisearch seem to be working on a cloud hosting, but there's just a waitlist and no mention of the pricing. I doubt it would be affordable for this kind of use case but we never know.

It's true that if few people use the search bar, switching driver might not make a lot of sense. One place where people might not immediately realize is using the search are mentions. The auto-complete relies on the same user search endpoint. But user search is also not dramatically improved over the native search since it's just usernames that are indexed anyway.

CyberGene

clarkwinkelmann I’m hosting my Flarum on Siteground. I could use another hosting where I have more choice about the cloud services but I will have to research it first. Siteground has been very reliable and fast, especially since I was on A2 before which was very unreliable.

010101

clarkwinkelmann That’s disappointing that TNT search ended up not being all that great. Maybe the devs for that will continue to improve it.

zjmw00

So I installed everything and did a php flarum scout:import-all and it ran through all the ID's, but now search returns nothing.

I'm not seeing any output from meilisearch in the console it's running in when importing or performing a search either, although I'm not sure I'm supposed to. What am I doing wrong?

I think it may not be populating the indexes with any data, but I'm not entirely sure how to verify that. I've tried sending some GET requests with curl but I can't seem to get anything back.

clarkwinkelmann

zjmw00 you can access meilisearch web dashboard (open meilisearch host:post in your browser) and check that the index contains entries and use the dashboard search to see if you get any result.

If everything works as expected in meilisearch web dashboard, I'm not sure what it could be... Can you share your php flarum info output and some more details about your hosting situation and the way you installed meilisearch?

zjmw00

clarkwinkelmann
In the web UI it shows no indexes found. I assume the import isn't working. I have around 5 million posts, and it took quite a while for that import to run. Visually, it looks like it's doing something, but I guess it wasn't. The import showed it importing users, discussions, and posts, if I remember correctly.

Here's php flarum info

Flarum core 1.5.0
PHP version: 7.4.32
MySQL version: 5.5.5-10.6.7-MariaDB-2ubuntu1.1
Loaded extensions: Core, date, libxml, openssl, pcre, zlib, filter, hash, pcntl, Reflection, SPL, session, standard, sodium, mysqlnd, PDO, xml, apcu, bcmath, calendar, ctype, curl, dom, mbstring, FFI, fileinfo, ftp, gd, gettext, iconv, igbinary, imagick, imap, intl, json, exif, memcache, msgpack, mysqli, pdo_mysql, Phar, posix, readline, redis, shmop, SimpleXML, sockets, sysvmsg, sysvsem, sysvshm, tokenizer, xmlreader, xmlrpc, xmlwriter, xsl, zip, memcached, Zend OPcache
+-----------------------+---------+--------+
| Flarum Extensions     |         |        |
+-----------------------+---------+--------+
| ID                    | Version | Commit |
+-----------------------+---------+--------+
| flarum-flags          | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-tags           | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-suspend        | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-subscriptions  | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-sticky         | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-statistics     | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-mentions       | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-markdown       | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-lock           | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-likes          | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-lang-english   | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-emoji          | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-bbcode         | v1.5.0  |        |
| flarum-approval       | v1.5.0  |        |
| clarkwinkelmann-scout | 0.2.0   |        |
+-----------------------+---------+--------+
Base URL: https://______________.com
Installation path: /var/www/archive
Queue driver: sync
Mail driver: mail
Debug mode: off

I installed Meilisearch following this:
https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/cookbooks/running_production.html#step-1-install-meilisearch

I stopped when I got to creating a service for it, I'll do that eventually but for now I'm just running the binary in a screen session.

One thing I've noticed is, when I use the scout commands such as php flarum scout:index testindex, there's no web request being made to Meilisearch, same with when I import indexes with php flarum scout:import-all.

Meilisearch is installed locally to Flarum.

Does Scout expect Meilisearch to be configured with https? Maybe that's why it doesn't hit it. I didn't go that far.

clarkwinkelmann

zjmw00 I only tested with mailisearch http, so that should be fine.

In the extension settings, is the driver choice correctly on meilisearch? It's strange if zero requests are made to meilisearch at all...

zjmw00

clarkwinkelmann

Forgive me, I'm new to Flarum, how do I get to those extension settings?

I see the Scout Search extension but inside it, it says "This extension has no settings". I don't see a Meilisearch one.

clarkwinkelmann

zjmw00 when you visit the Flarum admin panel and select Scout extension in the list (the place where you can enable/disable it). That's where you must have filled the meilisearch credentials already unless you used all the defaults?

After filling in or checking the defaults credentials work, you need to switch the driver selection from null to meilisearch. I don't remember the exact field names but I think it's something like this. The extension doesn't auto-detect which driver it should use since it supports multiple ones.

zjmw00

clarkwinkelmann

I'm just copying and pasting the text here because posting an image would have to be approved, but I don't get any settings in there.

Scout Search

    0.2.0

Algolia and Meilisearch search for Flarum
Enabled

    Clark Winkelmann
    Discuss
    Source

This extension has no settings.
Permissions
This extension has no permissions.

zjmw00

Looks like this

clarkwinkelmann

zjmw00 can you try clearing the Flarum cache and disabling/re-enabling the extension?

There should be a set of inputs where it says "no settings".

zjmw00

clarkwinkelmann

That did it! Thanks!

It's importing now and I see the requests coming through.

zjmw00

clarkwinkelmann

It's working great now. My last question would be, is there a way to modify the maxTotalHits?

https://docs.meilisearch.com/reference/api/settings.html#pagination

It seems like either Meilisearch or Flarum is limiting the results to 2 pages.

clarkwinkelmann

zjmw00 I don't think it's possible at the moment. I implemented the max value for the similar setting in TNTSearch, I could try adding it for Meilisearch if it works in a similar way.

I haven't checked where settings are passed for Meilisearch yet. Maybe you can also customize that via the global Meilisearch configuration and thus not require any change on the Flarum side?

zjmw00

clarkwinkelmann

It looks like all of the configuration is passed in as arguments when starting Meilisearch - I don't see any args for adjusting that, but then again, it says the default return value should be 1000 results. I'm only getting 2 pages of 20 results, so maybe Flarum is the limiting factor here, but I haven't been able to find anything in regards to that yet.

fakruzaruret

Meilisearch seems have much more suporter and users. It is maintained and updated actively. I feel it is more reliable and scalable.

CyberGene

Meilisearch is great. It really "fixed" the default Flarum search. Unfortunately all these solutions require some additional computations and are not supported on a shared hosting, so I used it on a DigitalOcean droplet but that added expenses to my little forum where people admitted they almost didn't use search at all, so I disabled it. But I can wholeheartedly recommend this extension with Meilisearch 👍🏻

« Previous Page Next Page »