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Search is the most tricky part in every application while everyone wants a quick and effective search engine for their application. Let’s see how we can make this process easy and scalable in a Laravel application. We will use a package called TNTSearch which is a full-text search engine written in PHP.

Installing TNT Search

Since we’ve composer as industry standard so installing packages is not a problem. just add the following line in your composer.json file

{
  "require"
	
	 : {
      "teamtnt/tntsearch"
	
	: "0.6.*"
	
	
   }
}

or simply run the following command right from your terminal.

$ composer require 
	
	
	
	
	
	teamtnt/tntsearch

it will pick appropriate version for you.

Now open up config/app.php and register the following service provider and create an alias for the namespaced facade.

Service Provider

TeamTNT\TNTSearch\TNTSearchServiceProvider::class
	
	
	
	

Alias

‘TNTSearch’
	
	
	
		=> TeamTNT\TNTSearch\Facades\TNTSearch::class
	
	
	
	

Now that the installation part is done, let’s dive into the cool stuff.

Indexing

Let’s say we’ve a products table with Title, Description and Price fields, we will create an artisan command to perform our indexing operations.

Open a terminal window and execute the following command to generate ProductIndexer class.

$ php artisan make:console 
	
	
	
	ProductIndexer

Locate the file at app/Console/Commands/ProductIndexer.php and set handle method like this

<?php

namespace App\Console\Commands;

use Illuminate\Console\Command;
use TeamTNT\TNTSearch\Facades\TNTSearch;

class ProductIndexer extends Command
{
    /**
     * The name and signature of the console command.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    protected $signature = 'index:products';

    /**
     * The console command description.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    protected $description = 'Index the Products';

    /**
     * Create a new command instance.
     */
    public function __construct()
    {
        parent::__construct();
    }

    /**
     * Execute the console command.
     *
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function handle()
    {
        $indexer = TNTSearch::createIndex('products.index');
        $indexer->query("SELECT id, title, description, price FROM products");
        $indexer->run();
    }
}

Cool! Now Register the command with Laravel by appending the following line into the $commands array in app/Console/Kernal.php

\App\Console\Commands\ProductIndexer::class
	
	

Our indexing part is almost done, we can index our products any time by running the following artisan command

php artisan index:
	
	products

You can find the newly generated index file atstorage/products.index

Performing a Search

Let’s setup a search form real quick with routes and controller actions

# Displays our search form
Route::get('products', 'ProductsController@index');
# Displays our search results
Route::get('products/search', 'ProductsController@search');

From PrdouctController@index we’ll simply return a view which renders our search form and we’ll submit that form to ProductsController@search

Let’s see how to tackle the search part,

<?php 

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Http\Requests;
use App\Product;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use TeamTNT\TNTSearch\Facades\TNTSearch;

class ProductsController extends Controller
{
    ....

    public function search( Request $request )
    {
        TNTSearch::selectIndex("products.index");
        
        $results = TNTSearch::search($request->get('query'), 1000);

        $products = Product::whereIn('id', $results[ 'ids' ])->get();

        return view('search.results', compact('products'));
    }
    
    ....
}

We’re almost done, now our site has a basic but powerful search engine.

I'll share an other part of this article to discuss re-indexing and moving the indexing jargon to background using Laravel’s scheduler.

Thanks,

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