Lazysite

Search

Make pages searchable and add a client-side search UI.

lazysite supports client-side search via a JSON index generated by api: true + scan:. Pages opt in or out of search via front matter. The search UI loads the index once and queries it entirely in the browser.

Opt in or out

By default all pages are searchable (when search_default: true in lazysite.conf). Exclude a page:

---
title: Draft Post
search: false
---

Include a page explicitly (useful when site default is false):

---
title: Published Post
search: true
---

Site-wide default

Set in lazysite/lazysite.conf:

search_default: true

When not set, defaults to true (pages are searchable).

Search index page

Create public_html/search-index.md. The /**/*.md pattern recursively scans all subdirectories:

---
title: Search Index
api: true
content_type: application/json; charset=utf-8
search: false
ttl: 3600
tt_page_var:
  all_pages: scan:/**/*.md filter=searchable:true sort=date desc
---
[% USE JSON.Escape %]
[% all_pages.json %]

Requires libtemplate-plugin-json-escape-perl (Debian/Ubuntu).

Search results page

Create public_html/search-results.md with query_params: [q]. The starter site includes a complete reference implementation with weighted scoring, term highlighting, and tag filtering. The search box in the site bar or view template submits to /search-results?q=term.

Browser caching

The ttl: 3600 on the search index controls both server-side cache lifetime and the browser Cache-Control: public, max-age=3600 header. The browser caches the JSON for up to one hour.

Notes

  • Each page's first 500 characters of raw body are stored as excerpt for client-side snippet extraction
  • The search JS strips Markdown syntax client-side before matching
  • Title matches score highest (10), subtitle (5), tags (4), headings (3), body (1)
  • The search index and search results pages should set search: false to exclude themselves from the index
  • See Filtered scan for advanced index filtering