Forage

Hosted search for Flarum. Your posts are indexed on a search server of your own, and your forum's search box asks that server instead of the database. Searches come back faster, spelling mistakes still find things, and searching stops competing with everything else your database is doing.

Flarum 2.x only.

Setting it up

Install and enable the extension, then go to Admin, Extensions, Link Robins Forage, paste your setup key and save. That is the whole configuration: the endpoint, the keys and your plan's limit are fetched with the key, and your forum starts indexing itself straight away.

A banner at the top of the settings page tells you where you stand:

• Connected, with a count of how many posts are indexed
• Your search server is still being built, which is normal for a minute or two after subscribing. Press Check again rather than retyping the key.
• That key was not recognised, which means the key is wrong or the subscription has lapsed
• Cannot reach your search server, which means everything is set up but the server is not answering right now

Two switches sit under the key, both on to begin with: Show related discussions under each thread and Suggest similar discussions while someone writes.

A Forage subscription is what the setup key comes from: linkrobins.com/forage.

What it does

Search. Anything typed into the forum's search box, and any API request with filter[q], is answered by your search server. Browsing and filtering are not: Flarum only reaches for a search driver when there is a query, so tag pages, sorting and everything else still run against your database exactly as before.

Related discussions. Under every discussion, a short list of others like it, built from the same index, with when each one was last posted in. See more opens the rest in a window without leaving the page. And while somebody is starting a new discussion, a few existing ones with similar titles appear under the title box as they type, so a question that has been asked before can be found before it is asked again.

Both are suggestions and nothing more. Nobody is stopped from posting, the suggestions beside the composer go away on a click anywhere else or on the X and come back when the title changes, and when the search server has nothing to offer no panel appears at all. Each one has its own switch on the settings page, both on to begin with, so you can keep the list under a discussion and turn off the one beside the composer, or the other way round. Included on every plan.

Indexing. Every post is kept in step automatically: written, edited, hidden, restored, approved, deleted. Renaming a discussion re-indexes its posts, because each post is indexed under its discussion's title. Hiding or deleting a discussion takes its posts out of the index.

Spelling. A misspelled word still finds what you meant, as long as the word is long enough to tell a typo from a different word: five letters for one typo, nine for two. "rhubar" and "rhubrb" both find rhubarb. Short words are matched exactly, because at three letters almost every other short word is one typo away, and a search for "php" or "cat" that returned half the forum would be worse than useless. Typing the start of a word works at any length, so "bed" finds "beds".

Permissions. Results are always filtered through Flarum's own visibility rules before they are shown. The search server has no idea who is asking, so everything it returns is treated as a suggestion and checked against what the person searching is allowed to read. A member cannot see a private discussion, a hidden post, or a post awaiting approval through search, whatever the search server says. Hidden and unapproved posts are never indexed at all. Posts in permission-restricted areas — a members-only or staff tag, say — are indexed, so that the people allowed to read them can search them; they live on your own dedicated search server, and your forum's permission rules decide who sees them in results, exactly as they decide who sees them anywhere else.

If the search server is unavailable, searching falls back to the search Flarum ships with. Your search box keeps working; it is simply less good until the server is back. The same is true before you have entered a key at all.

What it does NOT do

• It does not search users, tags, or anything but discussions and posts.
• It does not block anyone from posting a duplicate. The similar-discussions list beside the composer is advice, not a gate.
• It does not change how results are displayed. Ranking comes from the search server; the page is Flarum's.
• It does not send anything to the search server except the post text, its id, its discussion's id and title. No usernames, no email addresses, no IPs.
• It does not index hidden or unapproved posts.

Rebuilding the index

The index is filled automatically when you first connect, and kept up to date after that. Rebuild it by hand when you have imported posts straight into the database, when your queue was not running for a while, or if you just want to be sure:

php flarum forage:reindex

Add --fresh to empty the index first, which also clears out anything left over from posts that no longer exist.

Requirements

• Flarum 2.0 or later
• PHP 8.3+
• An active Forage subscription
• Outbound HTTPS from your forum's server
• A queue worker is strongly recommended. Indexing runs as queued work. With Flarum's default sync queue, that work happens during the web request that triggered it, so posting a reply waits on your search server. With a real queue driver it happens in the background, which is what you want.

Updating

composer update linkrobins/flarum-forage
php flarum cache:clear

A note on how this hooks into Flarum

Flarum 2.0 lets an extension register a whole new search driver, and that is the obvious-looking way to build this. It is not what happens here, on purpose.

Filters, sorts and mutators are registered against a specific searcher class, so a driver that brings its own searchers silently loses every one of them that core and other extensions added. On a forum with Tags, filter[tag] would stop applying to searches, and the mutator that keeps restricted tags off the all-discussions list would stop running. So Forage replaces just the part that finds matches, and leaves the rest of Flarum's search pipeline in place. Every filter, sort and mutator any other extension has added keeps working.

Indexing does use Flarum's own indexing system, which is driver-independent by design.