php 61 lines · 8 steps

Making an Eloquent model searchable with Scout in Laravel

How Laravel Scout indexes an Article model and hands back full-text search results in relevance order.

Explained by highlit

Laravel Intermediate full-text-search indexing eloquent query-scopes eager-loading

1<?php
2 
3namespace App\Models;
4 
5use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
6use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
7use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsTo;
8use Laravel\Scout\Searchable;
9 
10class Article extends Model
11{
12    use Searchable;
13 
14    protected $fillable = ['title', 'body', 'status', 'author_id', 'published_at'];
15 
16    protected $casts = [
17        'published_at' => 'datetime',
18    ];
19 
20    public function author(): BelongsTo
21    {
22        return $this->belongsTo(User::class, 'author_id');
23    }
24 
25    public function searchableAs(): string
26    {
27        return 'articles_index';
28    }
29 
30    public function toSearchableArray(): array
31    {
32        return [
33            'id' => (int) $this->id,
34            'title' => $this->title,
35            'body' => $this->body,
36            'author' => $this->author?->name,
37            'published_at' => $this->published_at?->timestamp,
38        ];
39    }
40 
41    public function shouldBeSearchable(): bool
42    {
43        return $this->status === 'published';
44    }
45 
46    public function makeAllSearchableUsing(Builder $query): Builder
47    {
48        return $query->with('author');
49    }
50 
51    public function scopeSearchPublished(Builder $query, string $term): Builder
52    {
53        $ids = static::search($term)
54            ->where('published_at', '<=', now()->timestamp)
55            ->take(50)
56            ->keys();
57 
58        return $query->whereIn('id', $ids)
59            ->orderByRaw('FIELD(id, ' . $ids->implode(',') . ')');
60    }
61}

01 / 01

STEP 01

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Three takeaways

1Scout lets you customize exactly what gets indexed and when, so the search engine only ever sees the shape and subset of data you want.
2Eager-loading during bulk indexing avoids N+1 queries when your searchable payload pulls in related models.
3Search engines return IDs, not ordered rows, so you must re-impose relevance order yourself when hydrating from the database.

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