Deploy Meilisearch

Meilisearch Lite — Instant Search Engine

Blazing-fast RESTful search API with typo tolerance, out of the box. A single 50MB Rust binary — no database, no cache, no sidecars — with persistent storage on a Railway volume.

Deploy and Host

Host your own Meilisearch instance on Railway. This template provisions the Meilisearch engine with a persistent volume for your index data and snapshots.

Why Deploy

Meilisearch is the search engine behind thousands of production apps — instant results as you type, typo tolerance by default, and faceted filtering. Self-hosting it on Railway gives you:

• Persistent index — documents survive restarts on a Railway volume
• Instant search — sub-50ms responses on datasets of 100k+ documents
• Typo tolerance — users find results even with misspellings
• REST API — integrate with any language or framework
• Single binary — 50MB Rust, no external dependencies, minimal resource footprint
• Search-as-a-service at $2/mo — replace $100/mo Algolia plans

Common Use Cases

• RSS and article search — index 10k+ articles and search them instantly
• Notes and docs — make your knowledge base searchable in milliseconds
• Email search — index thousands of emails with typo-tolerant recall
• Logs — search application logs across services
• E-commerce — product search with facets, filters, and sorting
• AI agent memory — keyword recall for agent workflows alongside a vector DB

Deployment Dependencies

The deploy form pre-fills all required variables. No additional services needed — Meilisearch runs as a single container with a volume for persistent storage.

After the first successful deploy:

1. Test health: curl https://YOUR-DOMAIN.up.railway.app/health → {"status":"available"}
2. Retrieve your auto-generated master key from the MEILI_MASTER_KEY variable in the service settings
3. Authenticate with Authorization: Bearer YOUR_MASTER_KEY

About Hosting

Meilisearch runs as a single container on Railway. Index data persists on a Railway volume at /meili_data (database in /meili_data/data.ms, snapshots and dumps created alongside). The engine listens on port 7700 and exposes a REST API. A start command derives indexer thread and memory limits from the container's cgroup so the engine stays stable on small plans, and Railway healthchecks /health before routing traffic.

Features

• Instant search — results as you type, sub-50ms on large datasets
• Typo tolerance — misspellings handled out of the box
• Faceted search — filter and refine by attributes
• Multi-index — run separate indexes (rss, notes, emails, logs) in one instance
• RESTful API — clean JSON API, official clients for Python, JS, Rust, Go, PHP, and more
• Snapshots and dumps — backup and export built in
• Single binary — no Postgres, no Redis, nothing else to run

Dependencies for

• No external services required — Meilisearch runs standalone
• Optional: Qdrant companion — pair with a vector database for hybrid keyword + semantic search

Configuration

Quick Start

After deployment, the Meilisearch API is ready at your Railway public domain. Set MEILI_KEY to your MEILI_MASTER_KEY value:

export MEILI_DOMAIN=https://YOUR-DOMAIN.up.railway.app
export MEILI_KEY=YOUR_MASTER_KEY

# Health check
curl $MEILI_DOMAIN/health

# Create an index
curl -X POST $MEILI_DOMAIN/indexes \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MEILI_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"uid":"emails","primaryKey":"id"}'

# Add documents
curl -X POST $MEILI_DOMAIN/indexes/emails/documents \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MEILI_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '[{"id":1,"subject":"Kopia failed","body":"S3 backup bucket unreachable"}]'

# Search — instant, typo tolerant
curl "$MEILI_DOMAIN/indexes/emails/search?q=kopia+fail" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MEILI_KEY"

License

Meilisearch is licensed under the MIT License. See the Meilisearch GitHub repository for details.