Typesense Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Choosing a search backend for a Statamic-powered site: this package is the official-ish Rad Pack driver that swaps Statamic's native search for a Typesense index, so it directly informs the build-vs-buy call between "SQL/Laravel Scout + Typesense" versus "keep Statamic's flat-file search."
• Feature decisions around search UX: typo tolerance, faceting, instant/federated search, and relevance tuning are the product-visible capabilities Typesense unlocks; the driver work itself is mostly plumbing.
• Roadmap sequencing for search-related epics (search results page, filtering, autocomplete) — adoption of this package is the enabling dependency for those items, so it belongs in the platform-dependency track rather than a standalone feature.
• Operational/runbook decisions: adopting Typesense introduces a separate service to host, monitor, and reindex, which affects infra cost and on-call scope.
• v3.3.1 signal: exists() is now a read-only check (previously it could have side effects). This is a correctness/hygiene change with product implications — if any of our code (or the Statamic control panel flows we rely on) assumed calling exists() would provision or populate the index, that assumption now silently fails. Treat this as a "verify no implicit bootstrapping" task in any environment where indexes are created lazily on first request.

When to Consider This Package

• You are on Statamic (v3/v4 era) and want Typesense rather than Algolia/Meilisearch as the search engine; the Rad Pack driver is the shortest path.
• You need Typesense-specific features (fast faceting, geosearch, vector/hybrid search in newer Typesense versions) that Statamic's built-in driver cannot express.
• You are comfortable operating a Typesense node (or using Typesense Cloud) and can own index schema + reindex jobs in your deploy pipeline.
• Look elsewhere if: you are not on Statamic; you want a vendor-hosted search with no ops burden (Algolia); your search needs are simple enough for Statamic's native driver or a database LIKE query; or you need guaranteed long-term API stability — this is a community Rad Pack package with a small maintainer surface, so pin versions and read changelogs.
• With v3.3.1 specifically: adopt/upgrade only after confirming nothing in your app depends on exists() performing writes. If you use exists() as an implicit "ensure index exists" step, refactor to an explicit create/import call as part of the upgrade.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

To executives: This package lets our Statamic site use Typesense — a fast, open-source search engine — instead of living with basic built-in search. It buys us typo-tolerant, faceted, instant search without per-search vendor fees, at the cost of running one more service. The latest release (v3.3.1) is a small internal hardening change: a status-check method no longer has hidden side effects. Low risk, but it's a reminder that this is a community-maintained dependency we should version-pin and watch.

To engineering: v3.3.1 makes exists() a pure read-only check. Audit any call sites that relied on it to create or seed a collection, and move that logic to explicit setup/migration steps. Confirm on staging that index provisioning still happens on first sync/index operation before shipping.