Search

DocPlatform includes an embedded full-text search engine (Bleve) that indexes all content automatically. No external service to configure — search works out of the box.

Using search

Cmd+K dialog

Press Cmd+K (macOS) or Ctrl+K (Windows/Linux) anywhere in the web editor to open the search dialog.

┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  🔍  Search documentation...             │
├──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                          │
│  📄 Getting Started                      │
│     Install and configure DocPlatform... │
│                                          │
│  📄 API Authentication                   │
│     JWT tokens, OAuth2, and session...   │
│                                          │
│  📄 Docker Deployment                    │
│     Run DocPlatform as a container...    │
│                                          │
│  ↑↓ Navigate   ↵ Open   Esc Close       │
└──────────────────────────────────────────┘

What’s indexed

The search engine indexes:

• Page title (boosted weight for ranking)
• Page description (boosted weight)
• Full page content (body text, code blocks, lists, etc.)
• Tags (exact match boosting)
• Frontmatter metadata

Search syntax

Permission filtering

Search results are automatically filtered based on the current user’s permissions:

• Workspace-scoped filtering — results are limited to workspaces the user belongs to. This filtering happens at the search engine level.
• Page-level access — pages with access rules are filtered post-query based on the user’s role. A Viewer cannot find restricted admin-only pages through search, even if the content matches their query.

Indexing

Automatic indexing

Content is indexed incrementally via an async job queue:

1. A page is created or updated (via editor or git sync)
2. Content Ledger emits an event
3. A search indexing job is queued
4. The Bleve indexer processes the job and updates the index

There’s a brief delay (typically under 1 second) between saving a page and the updated content appearing in search results.

Rebuild the search index

If the search index gets out of sync (rare — usually after a crash or manual file manipulation), rebuild it:

docplatform rebuild

This drops the existing search index and re-indexes all pages from the filesystem. The process runs in the background — the server remains available during rebuild.

Index health

Check search index health with the doctor command:

docplatform doctor

The doctor reports:

• Number of indexed documents vs. database page count
• Orphaned index entries (indexed but no matching page)
• Missing index entries (page exists but not indexed)
• Index file size and last update timestamp

Search in published docs

Published documentation sites include a search interface for visitors. The search input appears in the site header and uses the same Bleve engine.

Public site search is scoped to published pages only — unpublished or restricted content never appears in public search results.

Search engine internals

For users who want to understand how search works under the hood:

Analyzer

Bleve uses the English analyzer by default, which includes:

• Tokenization — splits text on whitespace and punctuation
• Lowercasing — case-insensitive matching
• Stop word removal — filters common words (the, is, at, etc.)
• Stemming — matches word variants (running → run, documented → document)

Field boosting

Not all fields are weighted equally in relevance scoring:

This means a query matching a page’s title ranks higher than the same query matching deep in the body text.

Storage

The Bleve index is stored at {DATA_DIR}/search-index/ using the Bleve scorch storage engine (backed by bbolt). The index is separate from the SQLite database and can be safely deleted and rebuilt with docplatform rebuild.

Performance

Search performance scales linearly with content volume. For workspaces exceeding 10,000 pages, a future release will offer optional Meilisearch integration.