Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions

by asmodios • 3 months ago

89 27 3 months ago

cpollett• 3 months ago

code looks pretty clean. is small and compact, decent benchmarks. might want to consider using an autoloader for classes.

hparadiz• 3 months ago

The PSR-4 definition is properly defined in composer. There's no need to include an autoloader. Any project pulling this in would have it's own.

captn3m0• 3 months ago

Zend used to maintain a PHP port of Lucene 15 years ago that I used, but not sure what happened to it.

asmodios6• 3 months ago

Yes, Zend_Search_Lucene was dropped from Zend Framework 2 and never officially maintained for modern PHP. There's a community fork.

trog• 3 months ago

Any idea if it's any good? I used the old Lucene implementation ages ago and thought it was OK, though wasn't using it in a big way.

idoubtit• 3 months ago

I expected a toy project, but it is a usable library, which required a lot of work. Good job on delivering. A few comments:

After reading "composer.json", I thought that the tests used a custom framework. I'm glad the project does not suffer from NIH syndrome, but the dev dependency on PHPUnit should be declared.

There should a warning that it's only meant for some Western Latin languages. The normalization of the input is built on a character table for a handful of cases. That's not enough for some Latin languages, e.g. Turkish. And any input with Cyrillic, Arabic, CJK and so on, will be ignored.

There is no Unicode normalization or cleanup. Real-life input have many corner cases, e.g. diacritics next to the characters, or invisible characters inside a word to prevent hyphenation. Unless I'm mistaken, this engine would treat the NFD form "fête" as "fe te", instead of the expected "fete", which the NFKD form "fête" produces. I suggest using ext-intl for Unicode normalization, at least as an option.

Lastly, I can't think of a use case for this library. I've always had access to some external service (MySQL, Postgresql, Manticore Search, Solr, etc.) or to a PHP extension for a local Sqlite with FTS. Even for hobby projects, I haven't deployed to a shared hosting for more than two decades.

asmodios6• 3 months ago

Thank you for the detailed feedback, it's genuinely valuable.

You're right on all technical points : PHPUnit missing from dev dependencies is an oversight I'll fix, and the Unicode limitations are real and should be clearly documented. The NFD/NFKD case is a good catch.

On the use case: fair point. My motivation came from testing MySQL and SQLite full-text search on a shared OVH hosting : the performance with filters was consistently disappointing. That's the itch this scratches. I understand it doesn't match your experience, and that's perfectly legitimate.

otterley• 3 months ago

Do you have comparative benchmarks on the filter performance? I'm particularly interested in the SQLite FTS case.

S15H• 3 months ago

I would actually reconsider adding phpunit as a dev dependency. It is a tool that runs independently from your project. Therefore it should not live in composer. I would recommend declaring the phar dependency with phive.

https://docs.phpunit.de/en/12.5/installation.html#phar-or-co...

I find this project very impressive and have bookmarked it for potential use in future projects. Thank you for making this.

francislavoie• 3 months ago

We've been using https://github.com/loupe-php/loupe, works quite well for small-to-medium single-instance apps.

reconnecting• 3 months ago

Loupe seems to have a much longer dependencies list.

asmodios6• 3 months ago

Loupe is a great project and more feature-rich than php-fts (stemming, geo, Damerau-Levenshtein typo tolerance). The dependency difference isn't just about Composer packages. Loupe requires pdo_sqlite and SQLite >= 3.35.0, which isn't guaranteed on shared hosting.

BoxedEmpathy• 3 months ago

This is super cool! Thank you!

isaisabella• 3 months ago

Great start! This bridge between LIKE and a full-blown engine is exactly what's needed for the PHP long-tail.

ulrischa• 3 months ago

Great tool. Does it work with german umlaut (äöü)? I find it very useful because shared hosting is still big for me. I use ultra cheap shared hosting for nearly everything. No Server maintainance and no funky serverless stuff

gnyman• 3 months ago

You can also do something like this with static pages using https://pagefind.app/

I built a ChatGPT/claude history search tool and it works surprisingly well.

There are other tools also. Not to detract from this tool but just to inform people about alternatives.

4lun• 3 months ago

Not quite a comparable alternative. I use Pagefind and it's great for static sites but the search is all client side JS, there's no PHP (or otherwise) client to use it's generated index on the server.

A comparable alternative might be TNTSearch: https://github.com/teamtnt/tntsearch though that requires some (common) PHP extensions to be available, which this library does not require.

Skinless1501• 2 months ago

This looks pretty solid. What's so special about the dotless Turkish i that it's ignored?

asmodios6• 2 months ago

Thanks, that was a legitimate omission. I’ve now added transliteration support for Turkish-specific characters (`İ`, `ı`, `Ğ`, `Ş`, etc.) in the normalization layer.

asphodele• 2 months ago

An alternative for PHP full text search is the PHP DuckDB client [1], and using DuckDB with the Full-Text Search extension [2]. It also stores everything on the local file system and can scale to millions of records.

[1] https://duckdb.org/docs/lts/clients/php [2] https://duckdb.org/docs/current/core_extensions/full_text_se...

asmodios6• 2 months ago

Thanks for the suggestion. DuckDB is a great tool, but it requires installing a native extension, which is exactly the scenario php-fts is designed to avoid. The primary target is shared hosting (OVH, Infomaniak, o2switch…) where you have no control over installed extensions. If you can install DuckDB, you can probably also run Meilisearch or Typesense, which are purpose-built for search.

Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions

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