We can serialize our data for search using Jekyll's native filters like: xml_escape, strip_html, and jsonify. Lunr takes an array of keyed objects to build its index, so we need to get our data to the client in the right shape. Plus, it's only 8.4 kilobytes, so we can easily run it client-side.

We found a project called Lunr.js, which is a lightweight full-text search engine inspired by solr. That's smaller than some JavaScript libraries. That's actually not much data as it turns out-only 35 kilobytes when serialized for search. Our documentation is about 43,000 words spread across 39 pages. GitHub wasn't too keen on letting us run search functions on their servers, so we had to find another way to run full-text search on our documentation. We've recently added Search to the TrackJS Documentation site, built using the Jekyll website generator and hosted on GitHub Pages.

How do you allow users to search when you have no server functions and no database? But the awesome simplicity of website generators is also limiting.

Static website generators like Gatsby and Jekyll are popular because they allow the creation of complex, templated pages that can be hosted anywhere.

Javascript searching