Zola can build a search index from the sections and pages content to be used by a JavaScript library such as elasticlunr.
To enable it, you only need to set build_search_index = true in your config.toml and Zola will
generate an index for the default_language set for all pages not excluded from the search index.
It is very important to set the default_language in your config.toml if you are writing a site not in
English; the index building pipelines are very different depending on the language.
After zola build or zola serve, you should see two files in your public directory:
search_index.${default_language}.js: so search_index.en.js for a default setupelasticlunr.min.jsIf you set index_format = "elasticlunr_json" in your config.toml, a search_index.${default_language}.json is generated
instead of the default search_index.${default_language}.js.
As each site will be different, Zola makes no assumptions about your search function and doesn’t provide the JavaScript/CSS code to do an actual search and display results. You can look at how this site implements it to get an idea: search.js.
If you are using a language other than English, you will also need to include the corresponding JavaScript stemmer file. See https://github.com/weixsong/lunr-languages#in-a-web-browser for details.
In some cases, the default indexing strategy is not suitable. You can customize which fields to include and whether to truncate the content in the search configuration.