Search

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:

'search' => [
    'driver' => env('LARADOCS_SEARCH_DRIVER', 'auto'),
    'index' => env('LARADOCS_SEARCH_INDEX', 'laradocs'),
    'limit' => 20,
    'min_chars' => 2,
    'max_chars' => 10000,
],

#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:

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

composer require nyholm/psr7

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 pages from the index

#Per-page opt-out

Add search: false to any page's front-matter to keep it out of the index while leaving the URL fully reachable:

---

title: Internal Notes
search: false

---

Hidden pages (hidden: true) are never indexed regardless of the search: field.

#Config-level exclude list

Use search.exclude in config/laradocs.php to exclude a set of pages without touching each file. Values are fnmatch slug patterns:

'search' => [
    'exclude' => [
        'internal/*',   // all pages under /docs/internal/
        'changelog',    // the exact slug "changelog"
    ],
],

Excluded pages are still reachable — they just won't appear in search results.

#Config-level rank multipliers

Use search.rank to control where sections or individual pages appear in results without editing each file. Keys are fnmatch slug patterns; values are float multipliers. The first matching pattern wins, then multiplied by the page's own search_rank front-matter value (both default to 1.0):

'search' => [
    'rank' => [
        'guide/*'     => 2.0,    // Guide pages rank twice as high
        'changelog'   => 0.5,    // Changelog ranks half as high
        'reference/*' => 1.5,
    ],
],

Both the JSON engine and Scout engines respect rank. The JSON engine applies rank as a direct multiplier on its relevance score. Scout engines apply rank as a post-retrieval re-sort: each result's position in Scout's response is used as a base score, then multiplied by rank — so a strongly boosted page can overtake higher-relevance results, and a demoted page falls below them. When all ranks are 1.0 (the default), Scout's original order is preserved.

#Per-page rank override

Add search_rank: to a page's front-matter for one-off adjustments. It multiplies with any matching config pattern:

---

title: Important Page
search_rank: 3.0

---

A value of 0 sends the page to the bottom of every result set.

#Config-level include allow-list

When search.include is non-empty, only pages whose slug matches a pattern are indexed. Everything else is excluded:

'search' => [
    'include' => [
        'guide/*',
        'reference/*',
    ],
],

search: false front-matter is still respected inside an include pattern — a page matching an include pattern is still excluded if it declares search: false. exclude patterns take priority over include patterns for the same slug.

#Disabling search

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