Here's another approach: Make a templated JSON file that mimics a database-backend. When you generate the site (or just push to a GitHub Pages repo), the JSON file will be populated with the "search index" of your site. Something like this: https://github.com/swanson/lagom/blob/master/site.json
Then you can use whatever Javascript you'd like to search through your pages by pulling down the JSON file into memory and slicing and dicing to your heart's content.
This is really an approach that should get more attention.
People know all about database-backed websites (with an AJAX/REST server), and static-generated sites (with no server at all.)
But there's a middle-ground where you statically generate precomputed AJAX/REST responses to any query you could make, shove them in an S3 bucket and maybe put a CDN (e.g. Cloudflare) in front of it, and then treat that as your "server", building a traditional AJAXy frontend to talk to it. Scales nigh-on infinitely.
The best part is, it's not necessarily read-only! You can write a "real" server, too, that just handles updates. When it receives a request, GET the old version of the object it's modifying from S3 (no need for a database!), patch it up with the AJAXed-in data, and PUT it back. (And follow it up with a CDN single-file-purge API call, if it's relevant.)
I like this approach a lot. If you have hundreds or thousands of posts, it would also be pretty easy to only append new posts to the JSON file instead of regenerating the entire thing.
Comments
Here's another approach: Make a templated JSON file that mimics a database-backend. When you generate the site (or just push to a GitHub Pages repo), the JSON file will be populated with the "search index" of your site. Something like this: https://github.com/swanson/lagom/blob/master/site.json
Then you can use whatever Javascript you'd like to search through your pages by pulling down the JSON file into memory and slicing and dicing to your heart's content.
This is really an approach that should get more attention.
People know all about database-backed websites (with an AJAX/REST server), and static-generated sites (with no server at all.)
But there's a middle-ground where you statically generate precomputed AJAX/REST responses to any query you could make, shove them in an S3 bucket and maybe put a CDN (e.g. Cloudflare) in front of it, and then treat that as your "server", building a traditional AJAXy frontend to talk to it. Scales nigh-on infinitely.
The best part is, it's not necessarily read-only! You can write a "real" server, too, that just handles updates. When it receives a request, GET the old version of the object it's modifying from S3 (no need for a database!), patch it up with the AJAXed-in data, and PUT it back. (And follow it up with a CDN single-file-purge API call, if it's relevant.)
pretty much the approach taken with lunr.js (or you can store the search index itself, which is also json. http://lunrjs.com/
I like this approach a lot. If you have hundreds or thousands of posts, it would also be pretty easy to only append new posts to the JSON file instead of regenerating the entire thing.