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Installation

You can install Lyra using npm, yarn, pnpm:

npm i @lyrasearch/lyra

yarn add @lyrasearch/lyra

pnpm add @lyrasearch/lyra

Or import it directly in a browser module:

<html>
  <body>
    <script type="module">
      import { create, search, insert } from "https://unpkg.com/@lyrasearch/lyra@latest/dist/esm/src/lyra.js";

      // ...
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

See builds for details about the various builds packaged with Lyra.

Read the complete documentation at https://docs.lyrasearch.io/.

Usage

Lyra is quite simple to use. The first thing to do is to create a new database instance and set an indexing schema:

import { create, insert, remove, search } from "@lyrasearch/lyra";

const db = create({
  schema: {
    author: "string",
    quote: "string",
  },
});

Lyra will only index string properties, but will allow you to set and store additional data if needed.

Once the db instance is created, you can start adding some documents:

insert(db, {
  quote:
    "It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.",
  author: "Aristotle",
});

insert(db, {
  quote:
    "If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.",
  author: "Steve Jobs",
});

insert(db, {
  quote:
    "If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.",
  author: "Jim Rohn",
});

insert(db, {
  quote: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take",
  author: "Wayne Gretzky - Michael Scott",
});

Please note that the insert function is synchronous. If you have a large number of documents, we highly recommend using the insertBatch function instead, which prevents the event loop from blocking. This operation is asynchronous and returns a promise:

await insertBatch(db, [
  {
    quote:
      "It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.",
    author: "Aristotle",
  },
  {
    quote:
      "If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.",
    author: "Steve Jobs",
  },
  {
    quote:
      "If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.",
    author: "Jim Rohn",
  },
  {
    quote: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take",
    author: "Wayne Gretzky - Michael Scott",
  },
]);

After the data has been inserted, you can finally start to query the database.

const searchResult = search(db, {
  term: "if",
  properties: "*",
});

In the case above, you will be searching for all the documents containing the word if, looking up in every schema property (AKA index):

{
  elapsed: 184541n, // Elapsed time in nanoseconds
  hits: [
    {
      id: '41013877-56',
      score: 0.025085832971998432,
      document: {
        quote: 'If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.',
        author: 'Steve Jobs'
      }
    },
    {
      id: '41013877-107',
      score: 0.02315615351261394,
      document: {
        quote: 'If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.',
        author: 'Jim Rohn'
      }
    }
  ],
  count: 2
}

You can also restrict the lookup to a specific property:

const searchResult = search(db, {
  term: "Michael",
  properties: ["author"],
});

Result:

{
  elapsed: 172166n,
  hits: [
    {
      id: '41045799-144',
      score: 0.12041199826559248,
      document: {
        quote: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take",
        author: 'Wayne Gretzky - Michael Scott'
      }
    }
  ],
  count: 1
}

If needed, you can also delete a given document by using the remove method:

remove(db, "41045799-144");

Lyra exposes a built-in formatNanoseconds function to format the elapsed time in a human-readable format:

import { formatNanoseconds } from "@lyrasearch/lyra";

const searchResult = search(db, {
  term: "if",
  properties: "*",
});

console.log(`Search took ${formatNanoseconds(searchResult.elapsed)}`);
// Search took 164μs

Language

Lyra supports multiple languages. By default, it will use the english language,

You can specify a different language by using the defaultLanguage property during Lyra initialization.

By default, Lyra will analyze your input using an English Porter Stemmer function.
You can replace the default stemmer with the a custom one, or a pre-built one shipped with the default Lyra installation.

Example using ESM (see builds below):

import { create } from "@lyrasearch/lyra";
import { stemmer } from "@lyrasearch/lyra/stemmer/it";

const db = create({
  schema: {
    author: "string",
    quote: "string",
  },
  defaultLanguage: "italian",
  tokenizer: {
    stemmingFn: stemmer,
  },
});

Example using CJS (see builds below):

const { create } = require("@lyrasearch/lyra");
const { stemmer } = require("@lyrasearch/lyra/stemmer/it");

const db = create({
  schema: {
    author: "string",
    quote: "string",
  },
  defaultLanguage: "italian",
  tokenizer: {
    stemmingFn: stemmer,
  },
});

Right now, Lyra supports 23 languages and stemmers out of the box:

Armenian
Arabic
Danish
Spanish
English
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian
Italian
Irish
Dutch
Nepali
Norwegian
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Swedish
Turkish

Builds

Lyra is packaged with ES modules, CommonJS, and generic browser builds.

In most cases, simply import or require @lyrasearch/lyra and your environment will choose the most appropriate build ✨. In some circumstances, you may need to import or require certain files (such as stemmers). The following builds are included in the Lyra package:

path	build
`dist/esm`	ESNext build using ES modules. Use this for most modern applications (node.js, vite.js, browser modules, etc.)
`dist/cjs`	ESNext build using CommonJS (`require`). Use this for environments that don't support ES modules.
`dist/browser`	ES2019 build using CommonJS (`require`). Use this for environment that don't support modern ESNext language constructs, such as webpack 4 (used by Expo). Note, this build will be chosen by default in webpack environments such as Next.js.

Hooks

When dealing with asynchronous operations, hooks are an excelent mechanism to intercept and perform operations during the workflow. Lyra supports hooks natively. The create function allows you to specific a sequence of hooks.

import { create } from "@lyrasearch/lyra";

const db = create({
  schema: {},
  hooks: {
    // HERE
  },
});

Important: The hooks run in the same context as the main function execution. It means, that if your hook takes X milliseconds to resolve, the Lyra function will take X + Y (where Y = Lyra operation).

afterInsert hook

The afterInsert hook is called after the insertion of a document into the database. The hook will be called with the id of the inserted document.

Example:

import { create, insertWithHooks } from "@lyrasearch/lyra";

async function hook1 (id: string): Promise<void> {
  // called before hook2
}

function hook2 (id: string): void {
  // ...
}

const db = create({
  schema: {
    author: "string",
    quote: "string",
  },
  hooks: {
    afterInsert: [hook1, hook2],
  },
});

await insertWithHooks(db, { author: "test", quote: "test" })

License

Lyra is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

rlam3 / lyra