Jekyll Meilisearch Plugin

A Jekyll plugin that indexes your site’s content into Meilisearch, a fast and lightweight search engine. This plugin supports incremental indexing, ensuring efficient updates by only syncing changes between your Jekyll site and Meilisearch.

Features

• Indexes Jekyll collections (e.g., posts, pages) into Meilisearch.
• Incremental updates: adds new documents, deletes obsolete ones, and skips unchanged content.
• Configurable via _config.yml: customize fields, collections, and ID formats.
• Robust error handling with retries and fallback to full indexing if needed.
• Pagination support for large sites.

Installation

Add the gem to your Jekyll site’s Gemfile:

gem "jekyll-meilisearch"

And then add this line to your site’s _config.yml:

plugins:
  - jekyll-meilisearch

Configuration

Add the following to your Jekyll _config.yml (or a separate config file like _config.prod.yml):

meilisearch:
    url: "http://localhost:7700"  # Your Meilisearch instance URL
    api_key: "your-api-key"       # Meilisearch API key
    index_name: "my_site"         # Optional: defaults to "jekyll_documents"
    collections:
        posts:
          fields: ["title", "content", "url", "date"]  # Fields to index
          id_format: "default"                         # Optional: "default" or "path"
        pages:
          fields: ["title", "content", "url"]

Configuration Options

• url: The Meilisearch server URL (required).
• api_key: The Meilisearch API key (required). Recommended: use a dedicated api key for your index, not the admin one.
• index_name: The name of the Meilisearch index (optional, defaults to jekyll_documents).
• collections: A hash of Jekyll collections to index.
  • fields: Array of fields to extract from each document (e.g., title, content, url, date).
  • id_format: How to generate document IDs:

    • “default”

      “id”: Uses collection-name-number if a number field exists, otherwise sanitizes the document ID.

    • “url”: Uses the document’s URL, sanitized.
    • fallback: if “number” exists, uses “collection_name” + “number”

Run your Jekyll build:

bundle exec jekyll build

Or with multiple config files:

bundle exec jekyll build --config _config.yml,_config.prod.yml

Usage

Ensure Meilisearch is running and accessible at the configured url. Configure your _config.yml with the necessary meilisearch settings. Build your site. The plugin will:

• Create the Meilisearch index if it doesn’t exist.
• Fetch existing documents from Meilisearch.
• Delete obsolete documents.
• Index new or updated documents.
• Logs will output to STDOUT with details about the indexing process.

Include the following for adding search to your front :

<!-- Search Input -->
<div class="border m-6 mb-6 p-4">
  <input type="text" id="search" class="border p-2 w-full" placeholder="Rechercher...">
  <div id="results" class="mt-2 border p-4">Results will appear here.</div>
</div>

<!-- Meilisearch JS SDK -->
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/meilisearch@0.40.0/dist/bundles/meilisearch.umd.js"></script>
<script>
  const meilisearchConfig = {
    host: "http://localhost:7700",
    apiKey: ""
  };
  const client = new MeiliSearch(meilisearchConfig);
  const index = client.index('');

  document.getElementById('search').addEventListener('input', async (e) => {
    const query = e.target.value;
    if (query.length < 2) {
      document.getElementById('results').innerHTML = '';
      return;
    }
    try {
      const results = await index.search(query);
      document.getElementById('results').innerHTML = results.hits
        .map(hit => `<p><a href="${hit.url}" class="text-blue-500 hover:underline">${hit.title}</a></p>`)
        .join('');
    } catch (error) {
      console.error('Search error:', error);
      document.getElementById('results').innerHTML = '<p class="text-red-500">Search failed. Please try again.</p>';
    }
  });
</script>

Skip development

Use disable_in_development: true if you want to turn off meilisearch indexation when jekyll.environment == "development", but don’t want to remove the plugin (so you don’t accidentally commit the removal). Default value is false.

meilisearch:
  disable_in_development: true

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/unicolored/jekyll-meilisearch/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request