Search
Five interchangeable backends behind one switch — Pagefind, Orama, FlexSearch, Typesense, and Chroma.
Picking a backend
SVOCS ships five interchangeable search backends behind one switch: Pagefind (the zero-config default), Orama, FlexSearch, Typesense, and Chroma. Every page in the docs UI — the ⌘K dialog, keyboard navigation, result rendering — is identical no matter which one is active; only how the index gets built and queried changes.
Set PUBLIC_SVOCS_SEARCH_PROVIDER at build time to switch:
PUBLIC_SVOCS_SEARCH_PROVIDER=orama bun run buildLeave it unset and you get Pagefind — nothing to configure, nothing to run.
The three shapes
| Backend | How the index is built | Who runs it | Live server? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pagefind | WASM search index generated from your built HTML | A post-build CLI step | No |
| Orama | Raw page content shipped as static JSON, indexed in-browser | Part of the static build | No |
| FlexSearch | Same idea, different in-browser index library | Part of the static build | No |
| Typesense | Content pushed to a collection on your Typesense server | A sync script after the build | Yes, self-hosted or cloud |
| Chroma | Content pushed to a collection on your Chroma server (semantic search — server embeds it for you) | A sync script after the build | Yes, self-hosted |
Pagefind, Orama, and FlexSearch never leave the static-only story SVOCS is built around — nothing to run, nothing to host, nothing that can go down. Typesense and Chroma trade that away for a live, queryable server: better relevance tuning and (for Chroma) genuine semantic search, at the cost of standing up and securing a server the browser talks to directly.
Adding a backend to a scaffolded project
create-svocs-docs only ships Pagefind by default, to keep a fresh scaffold’s install small. The other four backends are documented, working code you copy in when you actually want them — each backend’s page below has the exact files and the one package to install.