tinysearch

tinysearch is a lightweight, fast, full-text search engine. It is designed for static websites.

tinysearch is written in Rust, and then compiled to WebAssembly to run in a browser.
It can be used together with static site generators such as Jekyll, Hugo, Zola, Cobalt, or Pelican.

Is it tiny?

The test index file of my blog with around 40 posts creates a WASM payload of 99kB (49kB gzipped, 40kB brotli).
That is smaller than the demo image above; so yes.

How it works

tinysearch is a Rust/WASM port of the Python code from the article "Writing a full-text search engine using Bloom filters". It can be seen as an alternative to lunr.js and elasticlunr, which are too heavy for smaller websites and load a lot of JavaScript.

Under the hood it uses a Xor Filter — a datastructure for fast approximation of set membership that is smaller than bloom and cuckoo filters. Each blog post gets converted into a filter that will then be serialized to a binary blob using bincode. Please note that the underlying technologies are subject to change.

Limitations

• Only finds entire words. As a consequence there are no search suggestions (yet). This is a necessary tradeoff for reducing memory usage. A trie datastructure was about 10x bigger than the xor filters. New research on compact datastructures for prefix searches might lift this limitation in the future.
• Since we bundle all search indices for all articles into one static binary, we recommend to only use it for small- to medium-size websites. Expect around 2 kB uncompressed per article (~1 kb compressed).

Installation

You can install tinysearch directly from crates.io:

cargo install tinysearch

To optimize the WebAssembly output, optionally install binaryen. On macOS you can install it with homebrew:

brew install binaryen

Alternatively, you can download the binary from the release page or use your OS package manager.

Usage

A JSON file, which contains the content to index, is required as an input. Please take a look at the example file.

ℹ️ The body field in the JSON document is optional and can be skipped to just index post titles.

Configuration

You can customize which fields are indexed and which are stored as metadata using a tinysearch.toml configuration file. Place this file in the same directory as your JSON index file.

[schema]
# Fields that will be indexed for full-text search
indexed_fields = ["title", "body", "description"]

# Fields that will be stored as metadata but not indexed
metadata_fields = ["author", "date", "category", "image_url"]

# Field that contains the URL for each document
url_field = "url"

If no configuration file is found, tinysearch will use the default schema (indexing title and body fields with url as the URL field).

Once you created the index, you can generate a WebAssembly search engine:

# Generate WASM files with demo for development
tinysearch -m wasm -p wasm_output fixtures/index.json

# Production-ready output (WASM only, no demo files)
tinysearch --release -m wasm -p wasm_output fixtures/index.json

# With optimization (requires wasm-opt from binaryen)
tinysearch --release -o -m wasm -p wasm_output fixtures/index.json

This creates a dependency-free WASM module using vanilla cargo build instead of wasm-pack.

Demo

Try the interactive demo with a single command:

make demo

This will generate WASM files and start a local server. Open http://localhost:8000/demo/ to try it out.

You can also take a look at the code examples for different static site generators here.

Configuration Examples

E-commerce Site with Product Metadata

For an e-commerce site where you want to search product titles and descriptions but also store metadata like prices and image URLs:

[schema]
indexed_fields = ["title", "description", "category", "tags"]
metadata_fields = ["price", "image_url", "brand", "availability"]
url_field = "product_url"

JSON structure:

[
    {
        "title": "Wireless Headphones",
        "description": "High-quality wireless headphones with noise cancellation",
        "category": "Electronics",
        "tags": "audio headphones wireless bluetooth",
        "product_url": "https://store.example.com/headphones-123",
        "price": "$199.99",
        "image_url": "https://store.example.com/images/headphones.jpg",
        "brand": "TechAudio",
        "availability": "In Stock"
    }
]

Blog with Author and Date Information

For a blog where you want to search titles and content but also store author and publication metadata:

[schema]
indexed_fields = ["title", "body", "excerpt"]
metadata_fields = ["author", "publish_date", "tags", "featured_image"]
url_field = "permalink"

Documentation Site

For a documentation site where you want extensive search across multiple content types:

[schema]
indexed_fields = ["title", "content", "section", "keywords"]
metadata_fields = ["version", "last_updated", "contributor"]
url_field = "doc_url"

Library Usage (Experimental)

tinysearch can be used as a Rust library for programmatic search index generation and searching. This feature is experimental and the API may change.

Add tinysearch to your Cargo.toml:

cargo add tinysearch

Basic usage with the provided BasicPost struct:

use tinysearch::{BasicPost, TinySearch};
use std::collections::HashMap;

let posts = vec![
    BasicPost {
        title: "My Post".to_string(),
        url: "/my-post".to_string(),
        body: Some("Post content here".to_string()),
        meta: HashMap::new(),
    }
];

let search = TinySearch::new();
let index = search.build_index(&posts)?;
let results = search.search(&index, "content", 10);

For advanced usage including custom post types and configuration, see:

• Basic library example
• Advanced library example

Advanced Usage

For advanced usage options, run

tinysearch --help

Please check what's required to host WebAssembly in production -- you will need to explicitly set gzip mime types.

Docker

If you don't have a full Rust setup available, you can also use our nightly-built Docker images.

Here is how to quickly try tinysearch with Docker:

# Download a sample blog index from endler.dev
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tinysearch/tinysearch/master/fixtures/index.json
# Create the WASM output
docker run -v $PWD:/app tinysearch/cli -m wasm -p /app/wasm_output /app/index.json

By default, the most recent stable Alpine Rust image is used. To get nightly, run

docker build --build-arg RUST_IMAGE=rustlang/rust:nightly-alpine -t tinysearch/cli:nightly .

Advanced Docker Build Args

• WASM_REPO: Overwrite the wasm-pack repository
• WASM_BRANCH: Overwrite the repository branch to use
• TINY_REPO: Overwrite repository of tinysearch
• TINY_BRANCH: Overwrite tinysearch branch

Github action

To integrate tinysearch in continuous deployment pipelines, a github action is available.

- name: Build tinysearch
  uses: leonhfr/tinysearch-action@v1
  with:
    index: public/index.json
    output_dir: public/wasm
    output_types: |
      wasm

Users

The following websites use tinysearch:

• Matthias Endler's blog
• OutOfCheeseError
• Museum of Warsaw Archdiocese

Are you using tinysearch, too? Add your site here!

Maintainers

• Matthias Endler (@mre)
• Jorge-Luis Betancourt (@jorgelbg)
• Mad Mike (@fluential)

License

tinysearch is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.