docs/content/content/search.md

+++ title = "Search" weight = 100 +++

Zola can build a search index from the sections and pages content to be used by a JavaScript library such as elasticlunr.

To enable it, you only need to set build_search_index = true in your config.toml and Zola will generate an index for the default_language set for all pages not excluded from the search index.

It is very important to set the default_language in your config.toml if you are writing a site not in English; the index building pipelines are very different depending on the language.

After zola build or zola serve, you should see two files in your static directory:

• search_index.${default_language}.js: so search_index.en.js for a default setup
• elasticlunr.min.js

As each site will be different, Zola makes no assumptions about your search function and doesn't provide the JavaScript/CSS code to do an actual search and display results. You can look at how this site implements it to get an idea: search.js.

Configuring the search index

In some cases, the default indexing strategy is not suitable. You can customise which fields to include and whether to truncate the content in the search configuration.