ClearSearch

ClearSearch is a powerful and flexible search engine for Ruby on Rails applications that supports multiple databases (SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL).

Note: This was heavily inspired by the Active Record Search announcement, and I was curious about how I would build something like it. May Will for sure be dragons lurking. Test Heavily before using in production. Optimizations welcome.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'clear_search'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Generate and run the migrations:

$ rails generate clear_search:install
$ rails db:migrate

Add the searchable block to your model and specify which attributes you want to index:

class Post < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :account

  searchable do
    index :title
    index :content, with: %i[text prefix exact]
  end
end

The with option specifies which analyzers to use for the field. Available analyzers are:

• :standard (default) - Splits text into words
• :text - Similar to standard but optimized for full-text search
• :prefix - Enables prefix matching (e.g., "ann" matches "announcement")
• :exact - Exact string matching

Search through all indexed fields:

Post.search "announcement"

Search specific fields:

Post.search title: "announcement", content: "clear search"

Search results are ActiveRecord relations, so you can chain them with other scopes:

Post.search("announcement").where(published: true).order(created_at: :desc)

Records are automatically indexed when they are created or updated. However, if you need to reindex existing records, you can use:

# Reindex a single record
post.reindex_search

# Reindex all records for a model
Post.reindex_all

This is particularly useful when:

• Adding search to an existing model with data
• Modifying the search configuration
• Recovering from any indexing issues

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/afomera/clear_search.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.