moaines/illumi-search

Plug-and-play full-text search for Laravel — SQLite FTS5, MySQL FULLTEXT, PostgreSQL tsvector, FileEngine. Same API, zero config. BM25 ranking, CJK/RTL, boolean operators, spellcheck, multi-tenant, REST API. 810 tests, 4 engines.

1.23.1 2026-08-11 13:05 UTC

Requires

• php: ^8.1
• ext-mbstring: *
• illuminate/database: ^10.0|^11.0|^12.0|^13.0
• illuminate/support: ^10.0|^11.0|^12.0|^13.0
• meilisearch/meilisearch-php: ^1.16
• symfony/string: ^7.0 || ^8.0

Requires (Dev)

• filament/filament: ^3.0
• laravel/pint: ^1.0
• orchestra/testbench: ^8.0|^9.0|^10.0|^11.0|^12.0|^13.0
• php-debugbar/php-debugbar: ^2.0
• phpstan/phpstan: ^2.0
• phpunit/phpunit: ^11.0
• rector/rector: ^2.5
• wamania/php-stemmer: ^4.0

Suggests

• ext-intl: Required for advanced Unicode normalization and CJK tokenization. Without it, a fallback processor using symfony/string is used.
• ext-pcntl: Required for concurrent chunk processing in FileEngine. Without it, falls back to sequential processing (still functional, just slower).
• ext-sqlite3: Required for the SQLite FTS5 engine (default). Without it, use mysql, pgsql, or file driver.
• wamania/php-stemmer: Required for the StemmingTextProcessor. Install if you set ILLUMI_SEARCH_PROCESSOR=stemming.

MIT

• moaines

• search
• mysql
• sqlite
• postgresql
• laravel
• self-hosted
• fulltext-search
• fts5
• file-engine

Published on Packagist.org on 2026-08-11 13:05 UTC

README

Write search code once. Switch engines by changing one .env value.

Laravel full-text search with your choice of backends — SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, FileEngine, Meilisearch. Same API, same operators, same 966 tests validating cross-engine consistency. Use your app's own database (SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL — zero extra infrastructure) or add a dedicated search server (Meilisearch — instant typo tolerance).

Full documentation: illumi-search-documentation — quick start, configuration, query builder, advanced features, tenancy, custom engines, testing, and a full capacity benchmark report.

Why not just Laravel's native whereFullText? Laravel's built-in full-text search covers basic MATCH/AGAINST (MySQL) and to_tsvector (PostgreSQL) — but it has no SQLite FTS5 support, no boolean query language, and no spellcheck. illumi-search adds a full operator set (AND/OR/NOT/NEAR/phrase/wildcard), spellcheck, CJK/RTL handling, faceted search, and cross-engine consistency.

Quick Start (30 seconds)

composer require moaines/illumi-search

// 1. Add the trait to your model
class Post extends Model
{
    use Moaines\IllumiSearch\Searchable;
    protected array $searchable = ['title', 'body'];
}

// 2. Build the index
// php artisan illumi-search:rebuild

// 3. Search
use Moaines\IllumiSearch\Facades\IllumiSearch;

$results = IllumiSearch::query('laravel')->get();               // simple
$results = IllumiSearch::query('php AND laravel')->get();       // boolean
$results = IllumiSearch::query('"design patterns"')->get();     // phrase
$results = IllumiSearch::query('prog*')->get();                 // prefix wildcard

Engines at a glance

Engine	ILLUMI_SEARCH_DRIVER	Best for
SQLite FTS5	sqlite (default)	Zero config — shops < 50k items, admin panels, intranets
PostgreSQL	pgsql	Multi-language, > 500k docs, best perf/scale
MySQL FULLTEXT	mysql	Existing MySQL projects, Latin content, ~500k docs
FileEngine	file	Serverless, embedded, no-DB, up to 1M+ docs
Meilisearch	meilisearch	Dedicated search server, typo-tolerant, millions of docs

Switch engines by changing .env — your application code never changes.

Features

Boolean operators (AND/OR/NOT/NEAR) · phrase · prefix wildcard · spellcheck · CJK/RTL · accent-insensitive · stopwords (7 languages) · multi-tenant · authorization · REST API · <mark> snippets · faceted search · aggregations · recency/popularity boost · search cache · Filament integration.

Performance

Standard benchmark at 1,000 docs (see 11 — Capacity Benchmark for volume/resource-trend data).

Metric	SQLite	FileEngine	MySQL	PostgreSQL	Meilisearch
Search (exact)	353 q/s	48 q/s	150 q/s	123 q/s	218 q/s
Latency p50	2.4 ms	14.8 ms	5.5 ms	8.1 ms	4.4 ms
NDCG@5	0.89	0.88	0.88	0.90	0.99

Full capacity report (per-volume limits, cold vs warm PostgreSQL, podman 1/2/8 GiB container tiers): 11 — Capacity Benchmark.

Testing

phpunit                              # 966 tests, ~1978 assertions
php artisan illumi-search:benchmark  # performance + quality
composer analyse                     # PHPStan level 6

License

MIT