Mellisearch Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Search as a feature, not a project: this package wires Meilisearch into Statamic's search driver abstraction, so a relevance-ranked, typo-tolerant search experience can be scoped as configuration plus front-end UX rather than a bespoke indexing service.
• Build vs. buy: it's a free, narrowly-scoped adapter over an OSS/self-hostable engine (with a managed Meilisearch Cloud option). That makes “buy” the default and reserves engineering effort for relevance tuning and search UX — the parts users actually notice.
• Platform lifecycle planning: v4.1.0 adds Laravel 13 support, which means the addon is tracking current Laravel majors. That's a signal you can keep it in a Laravel upgrade roadmap without planning a replacement or fork.
• Use cases to prioritize: content-heavy marketing sites, documentation/knowledge bases, product catalogs, and any Statamic site where editors expect instant, forgiving search (typo tolerance, prefix matching, facets) without standing up Elasticsearch.
• Explicit non-goals to set expectations: this is a backend driver, not a search UI, not an analytics product, and not a relevance-tuning service. Index schema design, reindex-on-deploy, and the search interface remain your responsibility.

When to Consider This Package

• Adopt when: you're running Statamic on a supported Laravel version (now including Laravel 13), you want Meilisearch specifically, and you're comfortable operating a Meilisearch instance or paying for Meilisearch Cloud.
• Adopt when: the team wants search behavior (typo tolerance, speed, faceting) with minimal custom code and no desire to own an Elasticsearch cluster.
• Verify before committing: the Statamic major-version constraint in the package's composer.json against your install — the Laravel 13 bump does not by itself confirm your Statamic version is supported.
• Look elsewhere when: you're not on Statamic (use the Meilisearch Laravel Scout driver directly instead of a Statamic addon), or you need advanced retrieval — complex aggregations, heavy NLP ranking, or large-scale hybrid/vector search — where Elasticsearch, Algolia, or a dedicated vector store is a better fit.
• Look elsewhere when: your hosting model can't run an external search service, or you need a fully managed search product (analytics, A/B relevance testing, merchandising) rather than a driver.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: this gives the site fast, relevant search without buying into a proprietary search SaaS or funding a custom build. The maintenance signal is good — v4.1.0 is a compatibility release adding Laravel 13 support, which keeps us on a supported framework path and reduces upgrade risk. Cost exposure is limited to hosting Meilisearch (self-hosted or cloud), and the dependency is small and replaceable.

For engineering: it's a thin adapter implementing Statamic's search driver contract on top of Meilisearch, so we avoid maintaining custom indexing code. v4.1.0 is non-breaking — a single Laravel 13 compatibility addition — so upgrading is low risk. Remaining engineering work is real but bounded: defining the index schema, handling reindexing on content changes and deploys, and building the front-end search experience.