Search

Red Glare integrates Pagefind — a static, self-hosted full-text search engine that indexes your built site at the end of astro build and ships a small client bundle for the search UI.

Enable it

Set pagefind: true in astro.config.mjs:

redGlare({
  pagefind: true,
})

That's the entire configuration. On astro build, the integration:

1. Auto-registers astro-pagefind alongside the build.
2. Runs the Pagefind indexer against dist/.
3. Writes the search index to dist/pagefind/.
4. Renders a search input in the USWDS header that hydrates the Pagefind UI on first interaction.

Dev mode

Pagefind needs a built site to generate its index. In astro dev, the search input is rendered but returns no results. Use astro build && astro preview to test search locally.

What gets indexed

Pagefind indexes everything inside <main id="main-content"> — which is every page's article body. The sidebar, TOC, header, and footer are excluded automatically.

Inside the body:

• Headings carry extra weight for ranking.
• Code blocks are indexed (useful for finding API names).
• Metadata like page titles and descriptions is prioritized.

To exclude a section from the index, wrap it in <div data-pagefind-ignore>. Rarely needed — Pagefind's default heuristics are good.

Customizing results

Pagefind's default UI is already wired up. For deeper customization — custom result rendering, filters, multi-site search — see the Pagefind docs.

Turning it off

Drop pagefind from the config (or set it to false). No Pagefind dependency is loaded, no index is built, and the search input is omitted from the header.

Build output size

Pagefind's index grows linearly with the amount of content. A ~20-page docs site adds roughly 200–500 KB of index files. Larger sites (hundreds of pages) will see a few MB — still a good trade-off versus the alternative of hitting a third-party API on every keypress.