Sqlout

Sqlout is a very simple MySQL driver for Laravel Scout. It indexes the data into a dedicated table of the MySQL database, and uses a fulltext index to search. It is meant for small-sized projects, for which bigger solutions such as ElasticSearch would be an overkill.

Sqlout is different than Scout 9's native Database engine because it indexes data in a separate, dedicated table, and uses a fulltext index. Sqlout has more features such as field weights and word stemming.

Sqlout is compatible with Laravel 5.8+ to 10.x and Scout 7.1+ / 8.x / 9.x / 10.x (credit goes to ikari7789 for Laravel 9 and 10 / Scout 9 and 10 support).

Version Compatibility

Laravel	Scout	Sqlout
5.8	7.1 / 7.2	1.x / 2.0
6.x	7.1 / 7.2	1.x / 2.0
6.x	8.x	2.0
7.x	8.x	2.0
8.x	8.x	3.x
8.x / 9.x	9.x	4.x
9.x / 10.x	10.x	5.x

Setup

Require the package:

composer require baril/sqlout

Publish the configuration:

php artisan vendor:publish

If you're not using package discovery, manually add the service providers (Scout's and Sqlout's) to your config/app.php file:

return [
    // ...
    'providers' => [
        // ...
        Laravel\Scout\ScoutServiceProvider::class,
        Baril\Sqlout\SqloutServiceProvider::class,
    ],
];

Migrate your database:

php artisan sqlout:make-migration
php artisan migrate

This will create a searchindex table in your database (the table name can be customized in the config file).

If you want to index models that belong to different connections, you need a table for Sqlout on each connection. To create the table on a connection that is not the default connection, you can call the sqlout:make-migration command and pass the name of the connection:

php artisan sqlout:make-migration my_other_connection
php artisan migrate

Making a model searchable

use Baril\Sqlout\Searchable;

class Post extends Model
{
    use Searchable;

    protected $weights = [
        'title' => 4,
        'excerpt' => 2,
    ];

    public function toSearchableArray()
    {
        return [
            'title' => $this->post_title,
            'excerpt' => $this->post_excerpt,
            'body' => $this->post_content,
        ];
    }
}

The example above is similar to what is described in Scout's documentation, with the following differences/additions:

• You'll notice that the model uses the Baril\Sqlout\Searchable trait instead of Laravel\Scout\Searchable.
• The $weight property can be used to "boost" some fields. The default value is 1.

Once this is done, you can index your data using Scout's Artisan command:

php artisan scout:import "App\Post"

Your models will also be indexed automatically on save.

Searching

Basics

$results = Post::search('this rug really tied the room together')->get();
$results = Post::search('the dude abides')->withTrashed()->get();

See Scout's documentation for more details.

Sqlout's builder also provides the following additional methods:

// Restrict the search to some fields only:
$builder->only('title');
$builder->only(['title', 'excerpt']);
// (use the same names as in the toSearchableArray method)

// Retrieve the total number of results:
$nbHits = $builder->count();

Using scopes

With Sqlout, you can also use your model scopes on the search builder, as if it was a query builder on the model itself. Similarly, all calls to the where method on the search builder will be forwarded to the model's query builder.

$results = Post::search('you see what happens larry')
    ->published() // the `published` scope is defined in the Post class
    ->where('date', '>', '2010-10-10')
    ->get();

⚠️ Keep in mind that these forwarded scopes will actually be applied to a subquery (the main query here being the one on the searchindex table). This means that for example a scope that adds an order by clause won't have any effect. See below for the proper way to order results.

If the name of your scope collides with the name of a method of the Baril\Sqlout\Builder object, you can wrap your scope into the scope method:

$results = Post::search('ve vant ze money lebowski')
    ->scope(function ($query) {
        $query->within('something');
    })
    ->get();

Search modes

MySQL's fulltext search comes in 3 flavours:

• natural language mode,
• natural language mode with query expansion,
• boolean mode.

Sqlout's default mode is "natural language" (but this can be changed in the config file).

You can also switch between all 3 modes on a per-query basis, by using the following methods:

$builder->inNaturalLanguageMode();
$builder->withQueryExpansion();
$builder->inBooleanMode();

Ordering the results

If no order is specified, the results will be ordered by score (most relevant first). But you can also order the results by any column of your table.

$builder->orderBy('post_status', 'asc')->orderByScore();
// "post_status" is a column of the original table

In the example below, the results will be ordered by status first, and then by descending score.

Filters, tokenizer, stopwords and stemming

In your config file, you can customize the way the indexed content and search terms will be processed:

return [
    // ...
    'sqlout' => [
        // ...
        'filters' => [ // anything callable (function name, closure...)
            'strip_tags',
            'html_entity_decode',
            'mb_strtolower',
            'strip_punctuation', // this helper is provided by Sqlout (see helpers.php)
        ],
        'token_delimiter' => '/[\s]+/',
        'minimum_length' => 2,
        'stopwords' => [
            'est',
            'les',
        ],
        'stemmer' => Wamania\Snowball\Stemmer\French::class,
    ],
];

In the example, the stemmer comes from the package wamania/php-stemmer, but any class with a stem method, or anything callable such as a closure, will do.