Meilisearch

Part of the Sidecar Services catalog.

What it does

Meilisearch is a lightweight instant-search engine focused on fast, typo-tolerant results. As a sidecar it backs instant or as-you-type search on a project locally, standing in for a hosted Meilisearch instance the production site queries. Add it when project code indexes content into Meilisearch and queries it for search, and you want that integration on your machine.

How it works

The preset pins getmeili/meilisearch:v1.7 and listens on container port 7700. It runs in development mode (MEILI_ENV=development) with the master key wdg-local-dev, and persists its index in a named volume mounted at /meili_data. Development mode keeps the bundled web search preview available without production hardening.

Meilisearch gets a browser UI: the host port is auto-allocated from the 7000 to 7999 range and de-conflicted across all projects.

wdg my-site service add meilisearch
wdg my-site service list

Read the browser URL from the service list output.

How it integrates with the local WordPress container

Adding the sidecar injects these env vars into the WordPress container:

Variable	Value
MEILISEARCH_HOST	wdg-my-site-meilisearch (the @HOST token resolved at add-time)
MEILISEARCH_PORT	7700
MEILISEARCH_KEY	wdg-local-dev

WordPress reaches Meilisearch over wdg-network at wdg-my-site-meilisearch:7700, never the host port. The host port exists only for your browser.

These env vars are connectivity hints. The project supplies the code that reads them, creates indexes, and runs queries:

$host = getenv( 'MEILISEARCH_HOST' ); // wdg-my-site-meilisearch
$port = getenv( 'MEILISEARCH_PORT' ); // 7700
$key  = getenv( 'MEILISEARCH_KEY' );  // wdg-local-dev

Adding the sidecar wires reachability only. The integration code lives in the project.

Add and remove

wdg my-site service add meilisearch
wdg my-site service remove meilisearch          # keeps the data volume
wdg my-site service remove meilisearch --purge  # also deletes the data volume