fts5index

SQLite FTS5 site search engine for Hugo

This is a simple search facility for Hugo generated sites. It uses SQLite's FTS5 full-text search engine, and a Go template that is itself generated from your site's theme for seamless look and feel integration.

The SQLite file format is portable across OS and architectures. You could build an index on a Mac and deploy to a Linux server. https://www.sqlite.org/aff_short.html

Installation

To build fts5index from source, run make in this directory.

copy bin/fts5index somewhere in your $PATH.

fts5index incorporates a subset of Hugo and you will need to rebuild it whenever you rebuild your copy of Hugo.

Indexing your Hugo site

From your Hugo main directory (i.e. where you would run hugo from):

fts5index -hugo

This will generate a SQLite DB file (by default search.db).

Running the search server

You will need to assign a port (by default port 8086 on localhost) for the server to run on. Note: it is not recommended to bind fts5index to anything other than localhost. While fts5index was coded with attention to security best practices, it has not been hardened or independently audited for potential security vulnerabilities.

The copy the file search.md somewhere in your hugo/content directory, e.g. hugo/content/search.md. When Hugo is run, this will generate a file hugo/public/search/index.html with your theme settings.

You will then start the search server using:

fts5index -template public/search/index.html

(follow your operating system instructions for how to turn this into a permanent service, using tools like Solaris SMF, Linux' systemd, OS X' launchctl or DJB's daemontools).

Configure your web server so that GET requests to the page, e.g. /search are proxied to fts5index instead of served from static files. On nginx, you would add the stanza:

location /search {
  proxy_pass             http://127.0.0.1:8086/search;
}

You can then add the search form to your templates:

<form action="{{ .Site.BaseURL }}search">
  <input name="q">
  <input type="submit" value="Search">
</form>