TinaCMS provides built-in search functionality for content. This is useful for allowing editors to quickly finding content in a site. TinaCloud's content search is powered by Fergus McDowall's search-index library.

Note: Search is not currently supported in self-hosted Tina.

Configuration

To enable search functionality, you will need to populate the search field in your Tina configuration. The only required element of the search configuration when using TinaCloud search is the search.tina.indexerToken field. This can be obtained from the TinaCloud dashboard for the project.

export default defineConfig({
  //...
  schema: {
    collections: [
      // Array of collections
    ],
  },
  search: {
    tina: {
      indexerToken: '<Your Search Token>',
      stopwordLanguages: ['eng'],
    },
    indexBatchSize: 100,
    maxSearchIndexFieldLength: 100,
  },
  //.. Other config
})

Definition

Building the search index

Development

When search is configured and a site is running locally with the dev command, content will be automatically indexed at startup. Any changes to local content will also trigger updates to the (local) search index.

Production

When search is configured and a site is being built for production using the build command, the search index will be automatically created and uploaded to TinaCloud. Each Git branch for your site has a separate search index.

Note that the search index is "live" once the site is built, so any newly added or removed content may be reflected in the search index before the site has been deployed. Building the search index can be skipped by passing the --skip-search-index cli option to the build command. Then the search-index command can be run separately once the site deployment completes.

Customizing search indexing

Excluding fields

By default, all collection field types (except image) are including in the search index. You can improve discoverability of content by controlling which fields are included in the search index. This is done by setting the optional searchable property on fields in the collection schema. For example, to disable indexing for an author field, use something like:

// ...
fields: [
  // ...
  {
    label: 'Author',
    name: 'author',
    type: 'reference',
    collections: ['author'],
    searchable: false, // Disable indexing of the author field
  },
]
//

Limiting text fields

By default, only the first 100 characters of a text field are used when building the search index. This can be adjusted globally in the search configuration (see above), but can also be done on a per field basis like so:

// ...
fields: [
  // ...
  {
    label: 'Post Body',
    name: 'body',
    type: 'string',
    maxSearchIndexFieldLength: 50, // Only index the first 50 characters of this field
  },
]
//

Alternative Search Providers

Currently only TinaCloud's search API is supported but we plan to provide alternative providers in the near future, as well as documentation for implementing custom search providers. If you'd like support for a specific search provider, let us know.

Last Edited: June 8, 2023