Documentation
Guide

Search

Full-text search for the command palette, with optional Scout engines.

On this page 7

Press ⌘K (or CtrlK) anywhere in your docs to open the command palette. Out of the box it searches page titles and body content, returning ranked results with a short excerpt around the match.

Laradocs builds a pre-rendered index of every page so search stays fast and works without any external services. If your application uses Laravel Scout, Laradocs will hand search over to your configured engine (Meilisearch, Typesense or Algolia) automatically.

How it works

  1. laradocs:index (also run by laradocs:cache) renders every visible page, strips it to plain text, and stores a compact index.
  2. The index is cached and keyed by file modification time, so it rebuilds itself whenever a document changes — and laradocs:clear drops it.
  3. The palette queries {prefix}/_laradocs/search?q=..., which returns JSON results from whichever engine is active.

In the palette

Results render the way you'd expect a docs search to:

  • Highlighted matches — every query term is marked in both the title and the excerpt, so you can see why a page matched at a glance.
  • Breadcrumbs — each hit shows the section trail it lives under (its group:, then any deeper folders), so same-named pages are easy to tell apart.
  • Grouped by section — hits are clustered under their section heading while keeping rank order, so related pages sit together.

Keyboard navigation (↑/↓ to move, ↵ to open) skips the section headings and lands only on results. If JavaScript or the index is unavailable, the palette degrades gracefully to title-only matching over the pre-rendered page list.

Choosing an engine

Configure the driver in config/laradocs.php:

php
'search' => [
    'driver' => env('LARADOCS_SEARCH_DRIVER', 'auto'),
    'index' => env('LARADOCS_SEARCH_INDEX', 'laradocs'),
    'limit' => 20,
    'min_chars' => 2,
    'max_chars' => 10000,
],
driver Behaviour
auto Use Scout when it's installed and configured, otherwise the JSON index.
scout Force Scout (falls back to JSON if Scout isn't installed).
json Always use the built-in, dependency-free JSON index.

JSON index (default)

No dependencies, no services. Laradocs ranks the cached index in-process: title matches outrank body matches, and every word in the query must appear somewhere on the page. Ideal for small-to-medium documentation sets.

Laravel Scout

Install Scout and an engine, then point Laradocs at it:

bash
composer require laravel/scout
# configure SCOUT_DRIVER + your engine credentials per the Scout docs
php artisan laradocs:index

Laradocs indexes pages through Scout without needing an Eloquent model or a database table, and maps results back onto the pre-rendered index for display. Re-run laradocs:index (or laradocs:cache) after changing content to refresh the engine.

Excluding a page

Add search: false to any page's front-matter to keep it out of the index:

markdown

---

title: Internal Notes
search: false

---

Hidden pages (hidden: true) are never indexed.

Set LARADOCS_SEARCH=false (the ui.search.enabled flag) to hide the palette's search box and disable the endpoint entirely.

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