Statamic Meilisearch Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Site search as a product surface: Gives Statamic-powered sites a first-class Meilisearch driver, so search relevance, typo tolerance, faceting, and instant-search UX can be shipped as a configuration exercise rather than a custom build.
• Build vs. buy for search: Supports the "self-host + open source" branch of the decision tree — Meilisearch is a permissively licensed engine, and this package is the thin integration layer — against the "managed SaaS" branch (Algolia, Typesense Cloud).
• Platform upgrade roadmap: v4.1.0 adds Laravel 13 support, so teams planning a Laravel 13 / current-Statamic upgrade can keep search out of the list of blocking workstreams.
• Cost modelling: No per-record or per-search pricing from the integration layer; the cost driver becomes infrastructure and ops time, which is easier to forecast and cap.
• Scope hygiene: Confirms the integration is a maintained, actively-tracked wrapper rather than bespoke glue code the team owns forever — reduces the long-tail maintenance liability of a custom search indexer.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it when all of the following hold:

• The site runs Statamic as its CMS (this is a Statamic Rad Pack driver, not a general-purpose Laravel search solution).
• Search is a product requirement — catalog browsing, documentation search, content discovery — and out-of-the-box Statamic search is too limited.
• The team can operate Meilisearch (or pay for a managed Meilisearch host); self-hosting a search service is an accepted ops cost.
• You are on, or moving to, Laravel 13 — this release is the compatibility signal that keeps the upgrade path clean.
• You need facets, filters, typo tolerance, or sub-100ms query latency that a database LIKE query cannot deliver.

Look elsewhere when:

• The application is plain Laravel without Statamic — use laravel/scout with the official Meilisearch driver directly and skip the CMS-specific layer.
• You want zero operational surface for search; a fully managed SaaS (Algolia, Typesense Cloud) removes the hosting and upgrade burden at the cost of per-record pricing.
• You need semantic/vector retrieval as a core requirement — evaluate the engine choice before this integration layer.
• Your Statamic version falls outside the supported matrix; the package tracks specific major versions and lags on new Statamic majors are a known rhythm.
• Search is marginal to the product — a database-driven filter is cheaper to own than a search cluster.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

To executives: This is a small, community-maintained integration that gives our Statamic sites production-grade search without per-query licensing fees. The v4.1.0 release adds Laravel 13 support, which means our platform upgrade is not gated on a search rewrite. Cost profile is infrastructure plus a modest amount of ops attention — predictable, and materially below managed search SaaS at our content volume. Risk is the usual open-source risk: a community maintainer, mitigated by the fact that the integration is thin and the underlying engine is swappable.

To engineering: Minor release, backward compatible — no migration, no config changes, no code changes required. The substantive item is Laravel 13 support, which clears a dependency constraint from the upgrade checklist. The package is a lean wrapper over Laravel Scout's Meilisearch driver with Statamic indexing glue; most behaviour lives upstream, so our customisation surface and debugging path stay small. Upgrade is a composer bump and a regression pass on indexing and query behaviour. Confirm our Statamic major is in the supported matrix before committing the upgrade ticket, and note that this release only widens compatibility — it does not change indexing semantics, so any existing relevance tuning carries over unchanged.