## 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:

```sh
PUBLIC_SVOCS_SEARCH_PROVIDER=orama bun run build
```

Leave 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](/docs/search/pagefind)     | WASM search index generated from your built HTML                                                  | A post-build CLI step         | No                        |
| [Orama](/docs/search/orama)           | Raw page content shipped as static JSON, indexed in-browser                                       | Part of the static build      | No                        |
| [FlexSearch](/docs/search/flexsearch) | Same idea, different in-browser index library                                                     | Part of the static build      | No                        |
| [Typesense](/docs/search/typesense)   | Content pushed to a collection on your Typesense server                                           | A sync script after the build | Yes, self-hosted or cloud |
| [Chroma](/docs/search/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.