Laravel Scout guide

In this guide, you will see how to setup Laravel Scout to use Meilisearch in your Laravel 10 application.

Before you start, make sure you have the following installed on your machine:

• PHP
• Composer

You will also need a Laravel application. If you don't have one, you can create a new one by running the following command:

composer create-project laravel/laravel my-application

Laravel comes with out-of-the-box full-text search capabilities via Laravel Scout.

To enable it, navigate to your Laravel application directory and install Scout via the Composer package manager:

composer require laravel/scout

After installing Scout, you need to publish the Scout configuration file. You can do this by running the following artisan command:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Laravel\Scout\ScoutServiceProvider"

This command should create a new configuration file in your application directory: config/scout.php.

Now you need to configure Laravel Scout to use the Meilisearch driver. First, install the dependencies required to use Scout with Meilisearch via Composer:

composer require meilisearch/meilisearch-php http-interop/http-factory-guzzle

Then, update the environment variables in your .env file:

SCOUT_DRIVER=meilisearch
# Use the host below if you're running Meilisearch via Laravel Sail
MEILISEARCH_HOST=http://meilisearch:7700
MEILISEARCH_KEY=masterKey

Laravel’s official Docker development environment, Laravel Sail, comes with a Meilisearch service out-of-the-box. Please note that when running Meilisearch via Sail, Meilisearch’s host is http://meilisearch:7700 (instead of say, http://localhost:7700).

For production use cases, we recommend using a managed Meilisearch via Meilisearch Cloud. On Meilisearch Cloud, you can find your host URL in your project settings.

If you prefer to self-host, read our guide for running Meilisearch in production.

With Scout installed and configured, add the Laravel\Scout\Searchable trait to your Eloquent models to make them searchable. This trait will use Laravel’s model observers to keep the data in your model in sync with Meilisearch.

Here’s an example model:

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Laravel\Scout\Searchable;

class Contact extends Model
{
	use Searchable;
}

To configure which fields to store in Meilisearch, use the toSearchableArray method. You can use this technique to store a model and its relationships’ data in the same document.

The example below shows how to store a model's relationships data in Meilisearch:

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use App\Models\Company;
use Laravel\Scout\Searchable;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsTo;

class Contact extends Model
{
    use Searchable;

    public function company(): BelongsTo
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(Company::class);
    }

    public function toSearchableArray(): array
    {
	      // All model attributes are made searchable
        $array = $this->toArray();

		    // Then we add some additional fields
        $array['organization_id'] = $this->company->organization->id;
        $array['company_name'] = $this->company->name;
        $array['company_url'] = $this->company->url;

        return $array;
    }
}

Configure which attributes are filterable and sortable via your Meilisearch index settings.

In Laravel, you can configure your index settings via the config/scout.php file:

<?php

use App\Models\Contact;

return [
	  // Other Scout configuration...

    'meilisearch' => [
        'host' => env('MEILISEARCH_HOST', 'https://edge.meilisearch.com'),
        'key' => env('MEILISEARCH_KEY'),
        'index-settings' => [
            Contact::class => [
                'filterableAttributes' => ['organization_id'],
                'sortableAttributes' => ['name', 'company_name']
            ],
        ],
    ],
];

The example above updates Meilisearch index settings for the Contact model:

• it makes the organization_id field filterable
• it makes the name and company_name fields sortable

After changing your index settings, you will need to synchronize your Scout index settings.

To synchronize your index settings, run the following command:

php artisan scout:sync-index-settings

You built an example application to demonstrate how to use Meilisearch with Laravel Scout. It showcases an app-wide search in a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application.

This demo application uses the following features:

• Multi-search (search across multiple indexes)
• Multi-tenancy
• Filtering
• Sorting

Of course, the code is open-sourced on Github. 🎉