Search preview

    Whether you are using Meilisearch Cloud or self-hosting Meilisearch, you can use the search preview for quick manual tests.

    After adding documents to your Meilisearch instance, you can immediately start searching through your dataset using Meilisearch's search preview. This can be useful when you want to check that documents have been properly indexed and Meilisearch is working as expected.

    If your Meilisearch instance does not have any indexes, you should see this screen.

    Meilisearch search preview instructing the user to set an API key and configure an index

    To access the search preview in your browser, navigate to the address and port specified in the command line argument --http-addr. If you did not configure --http-addr when launching your instance, Meilisearch's default address for the search preview is localhost:7700.

    For security reasons, the search preview is only available in development mode. You can disable it by setting the MEILI_ENV environment variable or --env CLI option to production. Note that you must set a master key in production mode.

    Example

    You can add a dataset containing many popular movies to an instance:

    curl \
      -X POST 'http://localhost:7700/indexes/movies/documents'\
      -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
      --data-binary @movies.json

    Once indexing finishes, you can access http://localhost:7700 and confirm everything is working correctly by searching for "The Truman Show":

    Animated gif in which a user types "trumen show" and sees "The Truman Show" as the top result