Laravel Scout Sonic Driver

Search Eloquent Models using Sonic indexes.

1. Implementation
2. Installation
3. Usage

Implementation

When implementing the toSearchableArray method, you need to provide an array that will be coerced into a string (the engine just joins with a ' ') as Sonic can only index strings. So you need to provide a "stringified" (index string) version of your model. The default toArray works but it is probably too much noise for reasonable usage.

Here is an example of the string I used when I was developing this Engine:

public function toSearchableArray()
{
    return array_filter([$this->display_name, $this->first_name, $this->last_name]);
}

For me, this builds a nice string for search that can match on a "name". In my application, the concept of "name" is either the User display name or first/last name.

---

If the locale is known, you can also create the getSonicLocale() method on your model, which returns the locale. It will then get passed to the Sonic PUSH calls:

// an ISO 639-3 locale code eg. eng for English (if set, the locale must be a valid ISO 639-3 code; if set to none, lexing will be disabled; if not set, the locale will be guessed from text)
public function getSonicLocale() {
    return 'none';
}

Installation

If you haven't already you should install Laravel Scout to your project and apply the Laravel\Scout\Searchable trait to any Eloquent models you would like to make searchable.

Install this package via Composer

composer require james2doyle/laravel-scout-sonic

Note: if you have Laravel >= 5.5 you can skip this step because of Package Auto-Discovery.

Next add the ServiceProvider to the Package Service Providers in config/app.php

/*
 * Package Service Providers...
 */
james2doyle\SonicScout\Providers\SonicScoutServiceProvider::class,

Append the default configuration to config/scout.php

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Sonic Configuration
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Here you may configure your Sonic settings.
|
*/

'sonic' => [
    'address' => \env('SONIC_ADDRESS', 'localhost'),
    'port' => \env('SONIC_PORT', 1491),
    'password' => \env('SONIC_PASSWORD'),
    'connection_timeout' => \env('SONIC_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT', 10),
    'read_timeout' => \env('SONIC_READ_TIMEOUT',  5)
],

Set SCOUT_DRIVER=sonic in your .env file

In addition there is no need to use the php artisan scout:import command.

Usage

Simply call the search() method on your Searchable models:

$users = App\User::search('bro')->get();

Simple constraints can be applied using the where() builder method:

$users = App\User::search('bro')->where('active', 1)->get();

Note: Sonic does not support the concept of "where", so the where is applied at the collection level not the query!

Pagination

Sonic cannot support real pagination because Sonic does not return proper paging or total information. It simply returns all the results for a given query.

There is a naive implementation of pagination in place but it probably isn't perfect as it doesn't take into account the "where" filter.

For more usage information see the Laravel Scout Documentation.