Self-Contained Search for Archived Static Site?

As the title suggests:

I've recently prepared a static version of a former WordPress site for the family of its deceased author, who want to keep the site online in perpetuity, in his memory.

The WordPress version of the site had a search function which, obviously, dynamically searched the WP database. I want to re-create a similar search index in the static version. Preferably in s self-contained way that doesn't rely on external servers eg. Google, DDD, Algolia etc. as those APIs may change in future and I want to be able to freeze the site as it currently is, without having to revisit it over the coming years because stuff has broken.

Most of the 'roll your own' search options out there seem to be overly complicated for what I need, as they're designed to be used on sites where the content is changing and being added to. As this site is being frozen 'as is', I just basically need something that will index the current content and prepare some kind of index of titles/keywords which can then be searched against.

Is anyone aware of anything that would fit the bill?

3 comments

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trinovantes 3y ago ↗

I use fuzzysort for one of my static site search results

https://github.com/farzher/fuzzysort

darekkay 3y ago ↗

There are a few client-side libraries like Lunr [1] or Elasticlunr [2]. For my recent project I went with a server-side approach using Stork [3]. It also provides a script to be used on the client.

[1] https://lunrjs.com/

[2] http://elasticlunr.com/

[3] https://stork-search.net/

Normille 3y ago ↗

Thanks for the replies and suggestions. I've just had a quick look at the blurb for each one, so could be wrong, but all of those seem to require manually building an index of titles / keywords/ etc which the scripts reference.

The site I'm working with has 600+ articles. So I was hoping for something that would automatically generate its own index by scanning the text contained in all those articles automatically.

Perhaps it's not possible in a non-database site.