Meilisearch Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Search infrastructure build vs. buy: Statamic's Meilisearch driver delegates search indexing and querying to a managed/hosted Meilisearch instance instead of building custom Elasticsearch-style search plumbing. This package is the glue layer; adopting it means committing to Statamic + Meilisearch as your search stack rather than hand-rolling indexing, relevance tuning, and typo tolerance in-house.
• Platform upgrade timing: v4.1.0 adds Laravel 13 support, which directly informs "when can we schedule the Laravel 13 upgrade?" The answer is now unblocked for teams running Statamic with Meilisearch-backed search.
• Roadmap sequencing for search features: Since relevance, filtering, faceting, and typo tolerance are handled by Meilisearch itself, roadmap items like site-wide search, instant search-as-you-type, and filtered category search become configuration work instead of engineering projects.
• Vendor/dependency risk register: Statamic Rad Pack is a community-maintained (not first-party Statamic) package. Track it as a maintained dependency with an active release cadence rather than a stagnant one.
• Hosting and ops cost decisions: Meilisearch is lightweight and self-hostable (single binary, low memory footprint compared to Elasticsearch), which affects whether you pick managed Meilisearch Cloud vs. self-hosted on existing infrastructure.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt when:

• You are running Statamic as your CMS (this is a Statamic driver, not a generic Laravel search package — it will not work meaningfully outside Statamic).
• You need fast, typo-tolerant, faceted site search and your content volume or query patterns have outgrown database LIKE queries or Statamic's built-in search.
• You want low operational overhead — Meilisearch is materially simpler to run than Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
• You need Laravel 13 compatibility and are planning that upgrade (v4.1.0 is the release that unblocks this).
• You are comfortable with a community-maintained driver under the Statamic Rad Pack org, with the caveat that support is best-effort rather than vendor SLA.

Look elsewhere when:

• You are not on Statamic (use Meilisearch's official PHP SDK or Scout's Meilisearch driver instead).
• You need enterprise-grade search with complex query DSLs, heavy aggregations, or petabyte-scale indices — that's Elasticsearch/OpenSearch territory.
• You require a commercially supported, SLA-backed search integration.
• Your search needs are trivial (small content set, simple keyword matching) — Statamic's native search may suffice and avoid an extra service.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: This is a small, actively maintained integration that lets our Statamic site use Meilisearch — a modern, fast search engine — without custom engineering. The new v4.1.0 release keeps us compatible with Laravel 13, so it removes an upgrade blocker and signals the package is still being looked after. Cost impact is minimal: Meilisearch is open source, lightweight, and can run on modest infrastructure or a low-cost managed plan.

For engineering: v4.1.0 is a compatibility release adding Laravel 13 support; no breaking changes or API surface changes are indicated. This is the version to target when we move to Laravel 13. Note the maintenance profile: community-maintained via Statamic Rad Pack, so we should pin versions, review the changelog on each minor bump, and keep an eye on issue responsiveness before relying on it for anything business-critical. No action required today beyond planning the upgrade path.