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OpenSearch for Flarum

A search driver for Flarum 2 backed by OpenSearch — or Elasticsearch, which speaks the same REST API for everything used here.

Flarum's built-in search is a LIKE scan of the database. It works, and on a small forum you will never notice anything else. It also cannot rank, cannot tolerate a typo, and gets slower with every discussion you add. This routes text searches to a real search engine instead, and leaves everything else exactly as it was.

What it does

• Discussions, posts and users — turn each on independently. Anything you leave off keeps using the database driver.
• Ranked results. A thread titled "Redis caching" outranks one that mentions the phrase in a reply.
• Typo tolerance. One edit's slack on longer words; short words stay exact, so cat never quietly matches car.
• Accent folding. jose finds José.
• Incremental indexing. Posting, editing, deleting and renaming keep the index current — you rebuild once at setup, not on a schedule. Flarum queues that work, so it needs a running queue worker (see below).
• Works with your other extensions. Filters registered against core's searchers are mirrored across, so tag:support refinement from flarum/tags keeps working.

What it does not do

It never decides who can see what. Flarum applies whereVisibleTo to every search before results are returned, so the cluster only ranks candidates the member could already read. A stale or over-broad index cannot leak a private discussion.

It also does not replace filtering or browsing. Core routes only text searches to a driver; sorting a tag by newest never touches the cluster.

Installation

Then, under Admin → OpenSearch:

1. Enter your cluster URL (https://localhost:9200), plus a username and password if your cluster requires them.
2. Press Test connection — it names the distribution and version it reached, so you know it is the cluster you meant.
3. Press Rebuild index, or run it from the CLI (see below).
4. Turn on the searches you want OpenSearch to answer.

Do step 3 before step 4. Enabling the driver against an empty index means every search returns nothing.

Keeping the index current

Flarum hands indexing work to its queue. On the default sync queue that runs inline and there is nothing to configure. If you have set queue_driver to Redis or the database — which most forums of any size have — those jobs only run when a queue worker is running:

Without one, new and edited posts are queued but never indexed, and search quietly serves stale results. This is core Flarum behaviour and applies to every search driver, but it is worth stating plainly, because nothing warns you.

Rebuilding from the CLI

The admin button queues a job; on the default sync queue that still runs inside a web request, which will time out on a large forum. Prefer the command:

--flush deletes the indexes without rebuilding them — useful when you are turning the extension off, or starting clean.

A note on TLS

Verify the TLS certificate is on by default and should stay on for any cluster reached over the public internet. Turn it off only for a cluster on a private or container network using a self-signed certificate, which is the common self-hosted case.

Requirements

• Flarum ^2.0
• PHP ^8.2
• OpenSearch 1.x/2.x/3.x, or Elasticsearch 7.x/8.x

No PHP client library is required — the extension talks to the cluster's REST API directly.

Links

• Packagist
• GitHub
• Report a bug

License

MIT — Ernest Defoe