Getting Started with MeiliSearch: Docker Setup, PHP SDK, and Custom Queries

Introduction

MeiliSearch is a fast, open‑source search engine that provides customizable indexing and search features such as filters, synonyms, typo‑tolerance, and Chinese tokenization. It can outperform ElasticSearch on small datasets.

Supported Features

Open source

Second most popular open‑source search engine

Chinese tokenization

Synonyms

Typo‑tolerance

Highlighting

Full‑text response

Advanced search

Stop‑words and stop‑fields

Weighting and de‑ranking

Logical search

Unique field aggregation

Pagination

Re‑indexing

Usage

Step 1: Install MeiliSearch with Docker

Pull the latest Docker image and run the container, exposing port 7700 and mounting a data volume.

# Fetch the latest version of Meilisearch image from DockerHub
docker pull getmeili/meilisearch:latest

# Launch Meilisearch
docker run -it --rm \
    -p 7700:7700 \
    -v d:/work/meilisearch/data.ms:/data.ms \
    getmeili/meilisearch:latest

When the container starts, a JSON response confirms the server is ready.

Step 2: Add Documents Using the PHP SDK

Install the MeiliSearch PHP client via Composer.

composer require meilisearch/meilisearch-php \
    guzzlehttp/guzzle \
    http-interop/http-factory-guzzle:^1.0

Repository: https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-php/

Create an index and add a set of movie documents.

require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

use MeiliSearch\Client;

$client = new Client('http://192.168.3.12:7700');
$index = $client->index('movies');
$documents = [
    ['id'=>1, 'title'=>'Carol', 'genres'=>['Romance, Drama']],
    ['id'=>2, 'title'=>'Wonder Woman', 'genres'=>['Action, Adventure']],
    ['id'=>3, 'title'=>'Life of Pi', 'genres'=>['Adventure, Drama']],
    ['id'=>4, 'title'=>'Mad Max: Fury Road', 'genres'=>['Adventure, Science Fiction']],
    ['id'=>5, 'title'=>'Moana', 'genres'=>['Fantasy, Action']],
    ['id'=>6, 'title'=>'Philadelphia', 'genres'=>['Drama']],
];
$index->addDocuments($documents); // => { "uid": 0 }

Step 3: Search Documents

Basic typo‑tolerant search

$client = new Client('http://192.168.3.12:7700');
$index = $client->index('movies');
$hits = $index->search('wondre woman')->getHits();
print_r($hits);

Custom search with highlighted results

require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
use MeiliSearch\Client;

$client = new Client('http://192.168.3.12:7700');
$index->search(
    'phil',
    [
        'attributesToHighlight' => ['*'],
    ]
)->getRaw(); // returns array format

The response includes highlighted matches:

{
    "hits": [
        {
            "id": 6,
            "title": "Philadelphia",
            "genre": ["Drama"],
            "_formatted": {
                "id": 6,
                "title": "<em>Phil</em>adelphia",
                "genre": ["Drama"]
            }
        }
    ],
    "offset": 0,
    "limit": 20,
    "processingTimeMs": 0,
    "query": "phil"
}