Meilisearch Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Search & discovery roadmap. lunarphp/meilisearch is the official Lunar (Laravel e-commerce) integration that wires Lunar's product/catalog models into Meilisearch via Laravel Scout. It directly enables the search-experience backlog: instant/typo-tolerant search, faceted filtering (price, brand, attributes), synonyms, and relevance tuning — without custom indexing code.
• Build vs. buy. The decision this package collapses is "do we write and maintain our own Meilisearch indexer for Lunar, or adopt the vendor-maintained driver?" Adoption trades control for a thin, upstream-maintained layer owned by the Lunar core team.
• Platform/architecture choice. Choosing this package is effectively choosing Meilisearch over Algolia/Elasticsearch/Typesense for the storefront. That is a cost, ops-burden, and hosting-topology decision (self-hosted vs. Meilisearch Cloud), not just a library choice.
• Segment fit. Best suited to SMB/mid-market Lunar storefronts and headless commerce builds where catalog search is a differentiator but the catalog is modest (tens of thousands of SKUs, not millions).
• Release-readiness signal for planning. This is 0.1.0-rc.2 — a pre-1.0 release candidate. That is a roadmap input: it can be piloted now, but it should not be on the critical path of a flagship launch without a fallback plan.

What changed in 0.1.0-rc.2 (assessed): dependency-only. The meilisearch/meilisearch-php requirement moved to ^0.26.1. No new features, no deprecations, no breaking API changes surfaced in the notes. Interpretation: the package is in pre-GA dependency-tracking mode, aligning with the upstream SDK rather than adding product surface area. The practical risk to model is transitive: two pre-1.0 layers stacked (this driver plus a 0.x Meilisearch PHP SDK), so minor-version churn should be expected.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it when:

• You are building on Lunar and need search that meaningfully outperforms database LIKE queries — relevance ranking, typo tolerance, and facets are on the near-term roadmap.
• You have standardized on Meilisearch (self-hosted or Cloud) and want the Lunar-specific indexing glue rather than writing it yourself.
• You can accept pre-release stability: pin the version, evaluate in staging, and budget a small amount of ongoing work to track RC → GA.
• You can verify version alignment — confirm meilisearch-php ^0.26.1 matches the Meilisearch engine version you run and doesn't conflict with other SDK consumers in the app.
• You are willing to abstract search behind an interface so the engine choice stays reversible.

Look elsewhere when:

• You are not on Lunar. Laravel Scout already ships a first-party Meilisearch driver; this package adds Lunar-specific value only.
• You need enterprise search capabilities: advanced merchandising rules, A/B testing of relevance, semantic/vector/hybrid search, or strict multi-tenant index isolation at scale. Evaluate Algolia, Elasticsearch, or Typesense directly.
• Your catalog exceeds Meilisearch's practical memory/index ceiling, or you have hard SLA, audit, or data-residency requirements.
• You need production certainty now and have no appetite for a 0.x dependency chain — wait for 1.0, or write a small in-house Scout integration you fully control.
• You are on an older Lunar major version not targeted by this RC; verify compatibility before assuming it drops in.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: This is a low-cost way to upgrade storefront search — typo tolerance, faceted filtering, and relevance ranking — using an officially maintained Lunar package instead of bespoke code we would have to own. The main caveat is maturity: this is a pre-1.0 release candidate whose latest version only bumps an upstream dependency. Treat it as a pilot with a defined go/no-go, not a committed launch dependency. Cost profile is favorable: Meilisearch is open source and self-hostable, so we avoid per-search SaaS pricing at our volumes.

For engineering: Architecturally it is a thin Scout/Meilisearch driver for Lunar's catalog — no new public API surface in rc.2, and no breaking changes or deprecations in the notes. The one substantive change is the meilisearch-php constraint moving to ^0.26.1, which is a compatibility alignment, not a behavior change. Risk to flag: two stacked pre-1.0 dependencies, so expect minor-version churn and pin accordingly. Recommended posture: pin the version, run it in staging against a realistic catalog, keep search behind an interface (repository/manager) so swapping to Typesense or a first-party Scout driver is a contained change, and add contract-style tests around indexing and query results to catch upstream drift early. Review again at GA or at any release that changes the public API or index schema.