Level up your Laravel development with Typesense!

Blazing-fast, typo-tolerant search for Laravel. Instant results, easy setup. Check Typesense out on GitHub!

Getting started with Typesense is easy and they offer two flavors. An on-premise self hosted version that you can install through their binary packages or from an official Docker image. Or if you prefer, you can use their cloud offering and be off and running instantly.

#Typesense Features

• Typo Tolerance: Handles typographical errors elegantly, out-of-the-box.
• Simple and Delightful: Simple to set-up, integrate with, operate and scale.
• ⚡ Blazing Fast: Built in C++. Meticulously architected from the ground-up for low-latency (<50ms) instant searches.
• Tunable Ranking: Easy to tailor your search results to perfection.
• Sorting: Dynamically sort results based on a particular field at query time (helpful for features like "Sort by Price (asc)").
• Faceting & Filtering: Drill down and refine results.
• Grouping & Distinct: Group similar results together to show more variety.
• Federated Search: Search across multiple collections (indices) in a single HTTP request.
• Geo Search: Search and sort by results around a latitude/longitude or within a bounding box.
• Vector Search: Index embeddings from your machine learning models in Typesense and do a nearest-neighbor search. Can be used to build similarity search, semantic search, visual search, recommendations, etc.
• Semantic / Hybrid Search: Automatically generate embeddings from within Typesense using built-in models like S-BERT, E-5, etc or use OpenAI, PaLM API, etc, for both queries and indexed data. This allows you to send JSON data into Typesense and build an out-of-the-box semantic search + keyword search experience.
• Conversational Search (Built-in RAG): Send questions to Typesense and have the response be a fully-formed sentence, based on the data you've indexed in Typesense. Think ChatGPT, but over your own data.
• Image Search: Search through images using text descriptions of their contents, or perform similarity searches, using the CLIP model.
• Voice Search: Capture and send query via voice recordings - Typesense will transcribe (via Whisper model) and provide search results.
• Scoped API Keys: Generate API keys that only allow access to certain records, for multi-tenant applications.
• JOINs: Connect one or more collections via common reference fields and join them during query time. This allows you to model SQL-like relationships elegantly.
• Synonyms: Define words as equivalents of each other, so searching for a word will also return results for the synonyms defined.
• Curation & Merchandizing: Boost particular records to a fixed position in the search results, to feature them.
• Raft-based Clustering: Setup a distributed cluster that is highly available.
• Seamless Version Upgrades: As new versions of Typesense come out, upgrading is as simple as swapping out the binary and restarting Typesense.
• No Runtime Dependencies: Typesense is a single binary that you can run locally or in production with a single command.

#Install Typesense

Option 1: You can download the binary packages for Linux (x86_64 & arm64) and Mac (x86_64).

Option 2: You can also run Typesense from the official Docker image.

Option 3: Spin up a managed cluster with Typesense Cloud:

#Typesense with Laravel

With Laravel Scout integrating this with your Laravel app is super simple. Just require Laravel Scout and Typesense:

composer require laravel/scout
composer require typesense/typesense-php

Then, set the environment variables in your application's .env file:

SCOUT_DRIVER=typesense
TYPESENSE_API_KEY=masterKey
TYPESENSE_HOST=localhost

Add the Searchable trait to your model:

<?php
 
namespace App\Models;
 
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Laravel\Scout\Searchable;
 
class Post extends Model
{
    use Searchable;
}

Finally, add a toSearchableArray

/**
 * Get the indexable data array for the model.
 *
 * @return array<string, mixed>
 */
public function toSearchableArray()
{
    return array_merge($this->toArray(),[
        'id' => (string) $this->id,
        'created_at' => $this->created_at->timestamp,
    ]);
}

You can check out the official Laravel Scout docs for complete details.