Search#

Ovellum's site search is powered by Pagefind, a static, client-side search engine. The index is built at ovellum build time from your generated HTML; at runtime it's pure browser + WebAssembly — no server, no external service, no API keys. It deploys as plain static files and works on any host.

It's off by default. One flag turns it on.

Enabling it#

{
  "site": {
    "search": { "enabled": true }
  }
}

On the next build, two things happen:

1. Indexing. After the site is written, Ovellum runs Pagefind over the output directory and emits a dist/pagefind/ folder — the search index, the WebAssembly runtime, and the default UI assets.
2. UI. The topbar gains a search box. Press ⌘K / Ctrl-K to focus it; results appear in a floating dropdown beneath it.

That's the whole setup — no other configuration, and Pagefind ships with Ovellum, so there's nothing extra to install.

How it works#

• Built at build, queried in the browser. Pagefind reads the rendered HTML of every page and writes a compact, chunked index. The small UI script loads with the page; the index data itself is fetched in chunks on demand as you type, so initial page weight stays minimal even on large sites.
• No backend. Everything lives under dist/pagefind/ as static files. There's no Algolia account, no service to run, nothing to keep in sync — deploy it like any other asset and search keeps working on a plain CDN.
• Themed to match. The default Pagefind UI is restyled through CSS variables to Ovellum's tokens (the same palette, radii, and fonts), so it looks native in both light and dark.

What gets indexed#

Pagefind indexes the rendered content of each built page — headings and body text — so results reflect exactly what a reader sees. Because it runs against the final output, it covers auto-generated API docs and hand-written prose alike. The index is rebuilt from scratch on every ovellum build.

Hosting#

• The dist/pagefind/ directory is part of your build output — upload it with everything else. Nothing special to configure on the host.
• Under a subpath (site.basePath), search still works: the UI resolves the index relative to the current page. See Hosting under a subpath.

Turning it off#

Leave the flag out, or set "enabled": false (the default). Pagefind never runs, dist/pagefind/ isn't emitted, and the topbar shows no search box — zero runtime cost.

See also the site.search field in the configuration reference.