Rodney Lab Newsletter — July 2023Rodney Lab Newsletter — July 2023
🔭 Site Search: Meilisearch, Orama & Pagefind #
Three modern tools for adding search to
SSG
Meilisearch
Powerful search database built in Rust with lightning fast searches. You can self-host or use Meilisearch cloud, performing document CRUD operations via a REST API.
- Meilisearch cloud free trial is limited to 14 days — normally priced as USD 30 monthly
- quick to set up within your local dev environment
- open source, flexible API with advanced features
Orama
Orama is another project, which uses JavaScript, and plays well with Deno, Node and Vite (it has zero dependencies). There is even an Astro integration, for automatically creating a search index for your static site.
- open source and easy to integrate with existing JavaScript or TypeScript projects
- indexing is fast and can be performed on-demand for moderate-sized sites; handy for serverless SSR tooling
- highly configurable; with stemming and typo tolerance parameters
Pagesearch
Designed for static sites, another lightning-fast Rust project, built for large sites.
- JavaScript API, with search UI elements similar to more established, premium offerings
- supports multilingual search
- no separate hosting required — Pagesearch generates a static search bundle
What is your experience with these tools? Do you have other modern alternatives? Let me know if you want to see content on using them with your favourite framework.
🧑🏽💻 Follower Feedback — Rust WASM #
Rust still seems to be on the up with JavaScript developers, with quite a bit of interest in the content on Serverless Rust with Deno and Cloudflare. Personally, I have been trying out Tauri, a Rust-based alternative to Electron for creating cross-platform apps. It is fantastic with SvelteKit. I love the bindings, which let you call Rust functions from SvelteKit front end code. The Tauri SvelteKit docs are great, which might explain why I have had more questions about using Rust WASM with SvelteKit, rather than Tauri! I have some content in the pipeline on Rust WASM and SvelteKit so look out for it!
📢 Fun Finds #
-
Coding Tips — TypeScript
raisefunction: return never again! Love this TypeScript tip from @heyImMapleLeaf via Matt Pocock. Neat for throwing an error when an environment variable is not defined, using minimal boilerplate. If you use Rust, it might remind you, a little, of the Rustexpectmethod. -
Productivity — Telescope: ThePrimeagen’s X thread got me using Telescope with Neovim. See the earlier edition for a fantastic getting started with Neovim/Neovide resource. For search in Neovim though, add the Telescope plugin, then use:
:Telescope find_filesas an explorer alternative;:Telescope buffersto fuzzy find an open buffer; and:Telescope live_grepto find files based on their content (needsripgrepinstalled).
-
Tooling — OpenSSF Scorecard: staying up-to-date with security best-practices is important, but not easy. Tooling like Dependabot goes some way with keeping projects up-to-date. If you want to take things a step further, though, try the OpenSSF Scorecard. It is designed to rate your project on best practices, though I think its strength is in highlighting best-practice gaps in your existing open source project’s workflow.
👋🏽 Until next time! #
Hope there was something valuable in here for you. As always, reach out with feedback. Here are some links to recent content, which I hope you will find useful: