Contrib.social

Use one Meilisearch server for a few separate websites

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 3 April 2024, about 1 year ago
Updated 7 May 2024, 12 months ago

Problem/Motivation

For a relatively small website, it would be beneficial to utilize the same Meilisearch server for both testing purposes (development, staging) and in production. However, this is currently impossible due to all environments (dev, stage, prod) using the same index names.

Proposed Resolution

There are three potential solutions:
1) Use separate Meilisearch instances for each website. However, this approach may be challenging to implement when multiple websites are hosted on the same server.
2) Use one Meilisearch instance with different indexes for each environment. This method would require index duplication, and any updates to fields would need to be propagated across all environment indexes.
3) Use a single Meilisearch instance and append a prefix/suffix to the index based on the environment. This solution appears to be the most promising.

Changes

The patch implemented solution 3. New Meilisearch backend settings were introduced: Front URL and Environment ID. Although the Front URL setting may be slightly out of scope for this specific issue, it could be valuable when utilizing Meilisearch React lib + Drupal.
After applying this patch, the indexes will remain unchanged in Drupal, but an environment suffix will be appended to the indexes in Meilisearch.
Now, with the assistance of a module like Config Split or settings.local.php, you can specify the environment for each website.
An example for settings.local.php:
$config['search_api.server.meilisearch']['backend_config']['meilisearch_env'] = 'dev';

✨ Feature request
Status

Needs review

Version

2.0

Component

Code

Created by

🇺🇸United States edwardsay

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Comments & Activities

  • Issue created by @edwardsay
  • Comment about 1 year ago →
    🇺🇸United States edwardsay
  • Comment about 1 year ago →
    🇺🇸United States edwardsay
  • Comment about 1 year ago →
    🇦🇹Austria tgoeg

    Not saying that your patch might not be beneficial, the way I solved this is the following:

    • Drupal multisite setup (so yes, multiple sites on prod and dev)
    • A dev and a prod Meilisearch instance (on separate servers, but this could be on the same server with different ports as well
    • Config split switches between the two instances based upon where the site lives

    I would however never advise to run dev and prod on one server, be the website as small as it may, considering you get a VPS instance for 3 EUR/USD a month.

    No need to justify yourself, and don't feel patronized, your patch might very well be useful.
    I just wanted to note this down for anyone looking to set this up similarly.

  • Comment 12 months ago →
    🇺🇸United States edwardsay

    Thank you, @tgoeg

    I completely agree regarding the necessity of separate servers for production and development environments. However, due to constraints, I had to devise a solution without completely altering the project architecture. Implementing a few Meilisearch instances on the same servers but with different ports is a fantastic idea, which I briefly mentioned as one possible approach in the description.

    Using index prefixes is a common practice. For instance, this functionality is available in the Search API Solr Drupal module. Therefore, I believe it would be beneficial to incorporate this feature into the Search API Meilisearch module.

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