README

Silverstripe Search is designed to integrate easily with the Silverstripe CMS. This Software Development Kit (SDK) is a one-stop-shop for getting your application integrated.

Setting up

Before you can get stared with this SDK you will need:

A Silverstripe CMS application
Bifröst Environment variables (provided when you sign up for Silverstripe Search)

Installation

To install the complete SDK run

composer require silverstripe/silverstripe-search-sdk

Using the SDK

Environment variables

To get started you will need to add the Bifröst environment variables (provided when you sign up for Silverstripe Search).

For local development this is normally done in your .env file and should look like the following:

BIFROST_ENDPOINT=<< provided on sign up >>
BIFROST_ENGINE_PREFIX=<< provided on sign up >>
BIFROST_MANAGEMENT_API_KEY=<< provided on sign up >>
BIFROST_QUERY_API_KEY=<< provided on sign up >>

For Silverstripe Cloud, you should add BIFROST_ENDPOINT and BIFROST_ENGINE_PREFIX as Variables, and BIFROST_MANAGEMENT_API_KEY and BIFROST_QUERY_API_KEY should be added as Secrets.

Configuration

You will also need to set up an initial index config file. We suggest using app/_config/search.yml so its easy to find later. A simple index that just indexes Page titles would look like:

SilverStripe\Forager\Service\IndexConfiguration:
  indexes:
    main:
      includeClasses:
        SilverStripe\CMS\Model\SiteTree:
          fields:
            title:
              property: Title

Here the name of the index variant is main. This is added to your BIFROST_ENGINE_PREFIX to give the full name of your index. E.g. if the BIFROST_ENGINE_PREFIX=search-acme-prod then this index's full name is search-acme-prod-main.

There are a range of options for you to customise your indexing to get the most out of your content. Refer to the Forager configuration docs for more information.

Warning

Once you add a field to an index you cannot change its name or type without deleting the engine so choose field names carefully

Next steps

From here we recommend looking into the individual modules installed by this SDK

how to get content into your search engine
getting the Search UI going
customising your search queries

Search Content management

The silverstripe/silverstripe-forager module contains provider-agnostic interfaces and admin UI for configuring the service and index management. The silverstripe/silverstripe-forager-bifrost contains Silverstripe Search specific implementation to connect you with our Bifröst API.

Refer to the silverstripe/silverstripe-forager docs for detailed information.

Search UI

The silverstripe/silverstripe-discoverer-search-ui module contains the base parts to show results on a Search page including a Page Type, Controller, templates, and basic styling.

Search page and results

The silverstripe/silverstripe-discoverer-search-ui package contains a base Search Page Type, Controller and Templates that work with the discoverer and forager modules. You can use the CMS to add the new Page Type to get up and running quickly.

To customise the look and feel of your search page then check out the silverstripe/silverstripe-discoverer-search-ui docs. If you would like to add filters or other advance query options then head over to the discoverer module.

Querying

The silverstripe/silverstripe-discoverer module contains provider-agnostic interfaces for performing search queries, including filtering and faceting. The silverstripe/silverstripe-discoverer-bifrost contains Silverstripe Search specific implementation to connect you with our Bifröst API.

Refer to the silverstripe/silverstripe-discoverer docs for more information on its use.

🛼 Roll-your-own installation

If you want to dial in your installation you can manually add the packages above to your composer.json. For example, if you only need the query module to integrate with your existing page types you could just install the silverstripe/silverstripe-discoverer module and the bifrost dependency: composer require silverstripe/silverstripe-discoverer silverstripe/silverstripe-discoverer-bifrost

silverstripe / silverstripe-search-sdk

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