GoKawiilA self-contained full-text search engine written in pure PHP.
No extensions. No external services. No dependencies. Just files.
Who is this for?
php-fts is designed for projects where deploying a dedicated search service is not an option — shared hosting, small VPS, or simply situations where you want to keep your stack minimal and portable.
If you have access to Elasticsearch, Meilisearch or Typesense and the infrastructure to run them, use those. They are more powerful and built for high-traffic, large-scale workloads.
If you don't — or if you'd rather not — php-fts gives you solid full-text search with ranked results, filters, and tolerant matching, with nothing to install and nothing to configure beyond a directory path.
It is a good fit if:
You are on shared hosting (OVH, Infomaniak, o2switch, etc.)
You want zero infrastructure overhead
Your dataset is in the range of hundreds to tens of thousands of documents
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