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Laravel Scout SQLite FTS5 Driver

Full-text search for your Eloquent models, powered by SQLite's own FTS5 engine. A Laravel Scout driver that keeps the search index right next to your data.

No daemon, no API key, no second datastore to keep in sync. composer require, one artisan command, and Model::search() works.

That query finds Jan Kowalski despite the typo, because search runs as a cascade of progressively fuzzier passes and stops at the first one that matches. Results come back ranked by BM25, ordered and paginated in SQL.

Why this driver

Scout's built-in database driver searches your model's own columns — with LIKE, or through a full-text index you create yourself.

Dedicated search engines — Meilisearch, Typesense, Algolia — mean running a service alongside your app. For a desktop app, a NativePHP build, a single-tenant SaaS, or a CLI tool, that is a lot of moving parts for a search box.

SQLite already ships a real inverted index. This package points Scout at it.

Not on SQLite? namoshek/laravel-scout-database is a Scout driver that builds its own inverted index in ordinary tables, and runs on every database Laravel supports.

Status

This is version 0, and it is the first implementation. The search was built for a NativePHP application and shaped by what that application needed, which is the case it is known to serve well — not evidence that it is the right shape for every application.

Development continues, and the way documents are written and stored is the part most likely to change — but not inside version 0. Every 0.x release keeps the index format the one before it had, so upgrading within 0 is an ordinary composer update. A change of format waits for version 1, which may index different things, store them differently, or lay the tables out another way entirely. When it comes, adopting it is a scout:fts5-rebuild rather than a migration you have to write, because the index is derived from your models.

Requirements

• PHP 8.3+
• Laravel 12 or 13, with Scout 11
• SQLite compiled with FTS5 — the default in every mainstream PHP build since 3.9

Check yours:

Installation

Point Scout at the driver in .env:

Then create the index tables and fill them:

scout:fts5-create finds every model in app/Models that uses Laravel\Scout\Searchable and gives each one a virtual table named after searchableAs() — customers becomes customers_fts. There is no migration to publish and nothing to commit: the tables are derived from your models, and scout:fts5-rebuild recreates them from scratch whenever you need.

Publishing the config is optional:

Usage

Everything is plain Scout. Make a model searchable and search it:

Sorting, filtering and pagination all happen in SQL before results are sliced into pages, so page 2 really is the second page of the order you asked for.

How search works

A query is answered by four passes, tried strictest first. The first pass that matches anything wins, and the rest never run — so an exact query costs exactly one indexed MATCH, and only a query that finds nothing pays for the fuzzy interpretations.

You can ask which pass answered, which is handy for telling a user you guessed:

Read more about the cascade and how it is ranked →

Filtering

Filters on columns you declare are answered by the index itself:

Filters on columns you did not declare still work — the driver joins the model's own table, which is in the same SQLite file. Nothing is silently ignored, and a filter on a column that exists nowhere throws rather than quietly returning wrong results.

Read more about filtering, ordering and soft deletes →

Commands

All of them take model class names, and discover models from scout-fts5.model_paths when given none. Scout's own scout:import, scout:flush and scout:index work as usual.

Configuration

The defaults are meant to be usable as they are. The knobs worth knowing about:

Turning off any keeps multi-word queries strict; turning off trigram means search never scans. Changing the tokenizer changes the index, so rebuild after touching it.

Full configuration reference →

Documentation

The full documentation is published at mtk3d.github.io/scout-sqlite-fts5, built with mdBook from the same pages that live in docs/ in this repository.

• How it works — the search cascade, ranking, and what the index actually looks like
• Architecture — C4 diagrams of where this sits and what it is made of
• Filtering and ordering — filters, sorting, pagination, soft deletes, string keys
• Configuration — every option, what it costs, and when it needs a rebuild
• Recipes — search boxes, "did you mean", multi-tenancy, NativePHP, bulk imports
• Edge cases — CJK, zeroes, short queries, empty filters, and other boundaries
• Decisions — why the package works this way, and what each choice costs
• Troubleshooting — every error this package throws, and what to do about it

Things to know

• Simplified search, not linguistic analysis. FTS5 is the engine; this package chooses what to index and which queries to try. There is no stemmer — matching is over strings, made forgiving by the cascade. What that costs and what covers for it →
• SQLite only. The driver refuses to boot on any other connection rather than failing halfway through a query.
• The index lives in your existing database. The tables are created on the connection Laravel is already configured with, alongside your own — there is no second database to provision. (It can be given a file of its own, at the cost of sorting and unindexed filters.)
• The trigram pass scans. It is last for that reason, and only runs when everything else came back empty.
• FTS5 tables cannot be altered. Adding a filter column means a rebuild; the driver detects the mismatch and says so instead of failing on an insert.

Testing

Credits

Extracted from the search implementation in Wrenchr, a workshop management app, where it replaced a Scout driver that scanned.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.md.