HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

asmodios

27 karma · joined December 5, 2025

submissionscomments
asmodios··on Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions
Thanks for the suggestion. DuckDB is a great tool, but it requires installing a native extension, which is exactly the scenario php-fts is designed to avoid. The primary target is shared hosting (OVH, Infomaniak, o2switch…) where you have no control over installed extensions. If you can install DuckDB, you can probably also run Meilisearch or Typesense, which are purpose-built for search.
asmodios··on Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions
Thanks, that was a legitimate omission. I’ve now added transliteration support for Turkish-specific characters (`İ`, `ı`, `Ğ`, `Ş`, etc.) in the normalization layer.
asmodios··on Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions
The zf1s/zend-search-lucene fork still works and gets occasional updates, but it's essentially legacy maintenance on a PHP 5.3-era codebase. It crashed on PHP 7 for a while, and the original ZF team themselves recommended moving on.
asmodios··on Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions
Loupe is a great project and more feature-rich than php-fts (stemming, geo, Damerau-Levenshtein typo tolerance). The dependency difference isn't just about Composer packages. Loupe requires pdo_sqlite and SQLite >= 3.35.0, which isn't guaranteed on shared hosting.
asmodios··on Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions
Thank you for the detailed feedback, it's genuinely valuable.

You're right on all technical points : PHPUnit missing from dev dependencies is an oversight I'll fix, and the Unicode limitations are real and should be clearly documented. The NFD/NFKD case is a good catch.

On the use case: fair point. My motivation came from testing MySQL and SQLite full-text search on a shared OVH hosting : the performance with filters was consistently disappointing. That's the itch this scratches. I understand it doesn't match your experience, and that's perfectly legitimate.

asmodios··on Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions
Yes, Zend_Search_Lucene was dropped from Zend Framework 2 and never officially maintained for modern PHP. There's a community fork.