Star-Lite Docs

Site Search

Star-Lite Docs includes built-in search powered by a /api/search endpoint that queries the database directly.

Ctrl+K search modal

Press Ctrl+K (or Cmd+K on Mac) to open the search modal. Type at least 2 characters to search across all published pages by title and content.

Results show the page title, a snippet with the matched text highlighted, and link to the page.

How it works

The search endpoint queries the ec_pages table using SQL LIKE patterns:

  1. Filters to published, non-deleted pages
  2. Matches the query against title and content columns
  3. Returns up to 10 results
  4. Extracts a text snippet from Portable Text blocks with <mark> highlighting around the matched term

This is a simple substring search — there's no full-text search indexing, stemming, or ranking. It works well for small to medium documentation sites.

Search API

The endpoint is public (no authentication required) and returns JSON:

GET /api/search?q=sidebar
{
  "results": [
    {
      "slug": "guides/sidebar",
      "title": "Sidebar Navigation",
      "snippet": "...edit the <mark>sidebar</mark> from the admin UI..."
    }
  ]
}

Queries shorter than 2 characters return an empty results array.

FTS and the drop-fts endpoint

Star-Lite includes a POST /api/drop-fts endpoint that drops SQLite full-text search indexes and triggers on the pages table. This is called automatically before every save operation to prevent FTS index corruption when content is updated.

The /api/search endpoint uses LIKE queries directly, so search continues to work regardless of FTS state.