# MeiliSearch
[](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/actions)
[](https://deps.rs/repo/github/meilisearch/MeiliSearch)
[](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/blob/master/LICENSE)
⚡ Ultra relevant and instant full-text search API 🔍
MeiliSearch is a powerful, fast, open-source, easy to use, and deploy search engine. The search and indexation are fully customizable and handles features like typo-tolerance, filters, and synonyms.
For more [details about those features, go to our documentation](https://docs.meilisearch.com/).
[](https://crates.meilisearch.com)
> Meili helps the Rust community find crates on [crates.meilisearch.com](https://crates.meilisearch.com)
## Features
* Search as-you-type experience (answers < 50ms)
* Full-text search
* Typo tolerant (understands typos and spelling mistakes)
* Supports Kanji
* Supports Synonym
* Easy to install, deploy, and maintain
* Whole documents returned
* Highly customizable
* RESTfull API
## Quick Start
### Deploy the Server
#### Run it using Docker
```bash
docker run -it -p 7700:7700 --rm getmeili/meilisearch
```
#### Download the binary
```bash
curl -L https://install.meilisearch.com | sh
./meilisearch
```
#### Compile and run it from sources
If you have the Rust toolchain already installed, you can compile from the source
```bash
git clone https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch.git
cd MeiliSearch
cargo run --release
```
### Create an Index and Upload Some Documents
We provide a movie dataset that you can use for testing purposes.
```bash
curl -L 'https://bit.ly/33MKvk4' -o movies.json
```
MeiliSearch can serve multiple indexes, with different kinds of documents,
therefore, it is required to create the index before sending documents to it.
```bash
curl -i -X POST 'http://127.0.0.1:7700/indexes' --data '{ "name": "Movies", "uid": "movies" }'
```
Now that the server knows about our brand new index, we can send it data.
We provided you a small dataset that is available in the `datasets/` directory.
```bash
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
The search engine is now aware of our documents and can serve those via our HTTP server again.
The [`jq` command-line tool](https://stedolan.github.io/jq/) can significantly help you read the server responses.
```bash
curl 'http://127.0.0.1:7700/indexes/movies/search?q=botman+robin&limit=2' | jq
```
```json
{
"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"
}
```
### Documentation
Now, that you have a running MeiliSearch, you can learn more and tune your search engine using [the documentation](https://docs.meilisearch.com).
## How it works
MeiliSearch uses [LMDB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Memory-Mapped_Database) as the internal key-value store. The key-value store allows us to handle updates and queries with small memory and CPU overheads. The whole ranking system is [data oriented](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/issues/82) and provides great performances.
You can [read the deep dive](deep-dive.md) if you want more information on the engine; it describes the whole process of generating updates and handling queries. Also, you can take a look at the [typos and ranking rules](typos-ranking-rules.md) if you want to know the default rules used to sort the documents.
### Technical features
- Provides [6 default ranking criteria](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/blob/3ea5aa18a209b6973b921542d46a79e1c753c163/meilisearch-core/src/criterion/mod.rs#L106-L111) used to [bucket sort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_sort) documents
- Accepts [custom criteria](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/blob/3ea5aa18a209b6973b921542d46a79e1c753c163/meilisearch-core/src/criterion/mod.rs#L20-L29) and can apply them in any custom order
- Support [ranged queries](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/blob/3ea5aa18a209b6973b921542d46a79e1c753c163/meilisearch-core/src/query_builder.rs#L342), useful for paginating results
- Can [distinct](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/blob/3ea5aa18a209b6973b921542d46a79e1c753c163/meilisearch-core/src/query_builder.rs#L324-L329) and [filter](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/blob/3ea5aa18a209b6973b921542d46a79e1c753c163/meilisearch-core/src/query_builder.rs#L313-L318) returned documents based on context defined rules
- Searches for [concatenated](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/pull/164) and [splitted query words](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/pull/232) to improve the search quality.
- Can store complete documents or only [user schema specified fields](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/blob/3ea5aa18a209b6973b921542d46a79e1c753c163/datasets/movies/schema.toml)
- The [default tokenizer](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/blob/3ea5aa18a209b6973b921542d46a79e1c753c163/meilisearch-tokenizer/src/lib.rs) can index latin and kanji based languages
- Returns [the matching text areas](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/blob/3ea5aa18a209b6973b921542d46a79e1c753c163/meilisearch-types/src/lib.rs#L49-L65), useful to highlight matched words in results
- Accepts query time search config like the [searchable attributes](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/blob/3ea5aa18a209b6973b921542d46a79e1c753c163/meilisearch-core/src/query_builder.rs#L331-L336)
- Supports [runtime incremental indexing](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/blob/3ea5aa18a209b6973b921542d46a79e1c753c163/meilisearch-core/src/store/mod.rs#L143-L212)
## Performances
With a dataset composed of _100 353_ documents with _352_ attributes each and _3_ of them indexed.
So more than _300 000_ fields indexed for _35 million_ stored we can handle 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](https://github.com/wg/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 something like _12 millions_ cities names in _24 minutes_ on a machine with _8 cores_, _64 GB of RAM_, and a _300 GB NMVe_ SSD.
The resulting database was _16 GB_ and search results were between _30 ms_ and _4 seconds_ for short prefix queries.
### Notes
With Rust 1.32 the allocator has been [changed to use the system allocator](https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/01/17/Rust-1.32.0.html#jemalloc-is-removed-by-default).
We have seen much better performances when [using jemalloc as the global allocator](https://github.com/alexcrichton/jemallocator#documentation).
## Contributing
We will be glad if you submit issues and pull requests. You can help to grow this project and start contributing by checking [issues tagged "good-first-issue"](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22). It is a good start!
### Analytic Events
We send events to our Amplitude instance to be aware of the number of people who use MeiliSearch.
We only send the platform on which the server runs once by day. No other information is sent.
If you do not want us to send events, you can disable these analytics by using the `MEILI_NO_ANALYTICS` env variable.