A tiny, full-text search engine for static sites built with Rust and WASM

tinysearch

This is a lightweight, fast, full-text search engine for static websites. I'm using it on my blog :

It is a Rust/WASM port of the Python code from the article "Writing a full-text search engine using Bloom filters" . This can be seen as an alternative to lunr.js and elasticlunr .

The idea is to generate a small, self-contained WASM module from a list of articles on your website and ship it to browsers. tinysearch can be integrated into the build process of generators like Jekyll , Hugo , zola , or Cobalt .

Limitations

• Only searches for entire words. There are no search suggestions (yet).
• Since we bundle all search indices for all articles into one static binary, we recommend to only use it for small- to medium-size websites. Expect around 4kB (non-compressed) per article.

Installation

wasm-pack is required to build the WASM module. Install it with

cargo install wasm-pack

To optimize the JavaScript output, you'll also need terser :

npm install terser -g

If you want to make the WebAssembly as small as possible, we recommend to install binaryen as well. On macOS you can install it with homebrew :

brew install binaryen

Alternatively, you can download the binary from the release page or use your OS package manager.

After that, you can install tinysearch itself:

cargo install tinysearch

Usage

As an input, we require a JSON file, which contains a the content you like to index. Check out this example file ).

tinysearch fixtures/index.json

(You can take a look at the code examples for different static site generators here .)

This will create a WASM module and the JavaScript glue code to integrate it into your homepage. You can open the demo.html from any webserver to see the result.

For example, Python has a built-in webserver for testing:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

then browse to http://0.0.0.0:8000/demo.html to see the result.

For advanced usage options, try

tinysearch --help

Maintainers

• Matthias Endler (@mre)
• Jorge-Luis Betancourt (@jorgelbg)

License

tinysearch is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 )
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT )

at your option.