Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

PHP Binding Overview

The laurus PHP extension provides PHP bindings for the Laurus search engine. It is built as a native Rust extension using ext-php-rs, giving PHP programs direct access to Laurus’s lexical, vector, and hybrid search capabilities with near-native performance.

Features

  • Lexical Search – Full-text search powered by an inverted index with BM25 scoring
  • Vector Search – Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search using Flat, HNSW, or IVF indexes
  • Hybrid Search – Combine lexical and vector results with fusion algorithms (RRF, WeightedSum)
  • Rich Query DSL – Term, Phrase, Fuzzy, Wildcard, NumericRange, Geo, Boolean, Span queries
  • Text Analysis – Tokenizers, filters, stemmers, and synonym expansion
  • Flexible Storage – In-memory (ephemeral) or file-based (persistent) indexes
  • Idiomatic PHP API – Clean, intuitive PHP classes under the Laurus\ namespace

Architecture

graph LR
    subgraph "laurus-php (extension)"
        PhpIndex["Index\n(PHP class)"]
        PhpQuery["Query classes"]
        PhpSearch["SearchRequest\n/ SearchResult"]
    end

    PHP["PHP application"] -->|"method calls"| PhpIndex
    PHP -->|"query objects"| PhpQuery
    PhpIndex -->|"ext-php-rs FFI"| Engine["laurus::Engine\n(Rust)"]
    PhpQuery -->|"ext-php-rs FFI"| Engine
    Engine --> Storage["Storage\n(Memory / File)"]

The PHP classes are thin wrappers around the Rust engine. Each call crosses the ext-php-rs FFI boundary once; the Rust engine then executes the operation entirely in native code.

Although the Rust engine uses async I/O internally, all PHP methods are exposed as synchronous functions. Each method calls tokio::Runtime::block_on() under the hood to bridge async Rust to synchronous PHP.

Quick Start

<?php

use Laurus\Index;

// Create an in-memory index
$index = new Index();

// Index documents
$index->putDocument("doc1", ["title" => "Introduction to Rust", "body" => "Systems programming language."]);
$index->putDocument("doc2", ["title" => "PHP for Web Development", "body" => "Web applications with PHP."]);
$index->commit();

// Search
$results = $index->search("title:rust", 5);
foreach ($results as $r) {
    printf("[%s] score=%.4f  %s\n", $r->getId(), $r->getScore(), $r->getDocument()["title"]);
}

Sections