Why Consider Self-Hosting Meilisearch?

While MeiliSearch offers a managed cloud service, self-hosting provides distinct advantages for organizations prioritizing control, security, and flexibility.

1. Data Sovereignty

Hosting MeiliSearch on your own infrastructure ensures sensitive data remains within your environment. Industries such as healthcare, finance, or those subject to GDPR regulations benefit from avoiding third-party data handling, simplifying compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.

2. Cost Efficiency at Scale

For applications with high search volumes or unpredictable traffic, self-hosting avoids recurring subscription costs.

What Are the Hardware Requirements for Self-Hosting MeiliSearch?

To self-host MeiliSearch effectively, understanding its resource demands is critical. Below is a breakdown of specifications based on official benchmarks and scalability principles derived from MeiliSearch’s documentation.

MeiliSearch uses two primary resources:

1. Disk storage for the database (LMDB file).
2. RAM for indexing and query operations.

According to MeiliSearch’s tests with the movies.json dataset (8.6 MB, 19,553 documents):

●       Indexed database size (LMDB): ~122 MB

●       Peak RAM usage during indexing: ~305 MB

This reveals a pattern: MeiliSearch’s RAM consumption scales with dataset size. For example:

●       A 1 GB JSON dataset would require roughly 35 GB of RAM (305 MB × 116).

●       The LMDB disk usage would grow to ~14 GB (122 MB × 116).

Note: You need to have Coolify installed in order to follow the next steps. To install Coolify on your Webdock Server follow this guide.

Install Meilisearch with Coolify

Follow the below steps to install coolify on your VPS.

Select Projects.

Add a new project by clicking on "Add".

Name your project and add a description.

Create resources in the production environment.

Select Meilisearch and Deploy.

To check logs check the logs tab.

Import initial data to Meilisearch

Go to your dashboard:

1. Copy the url
2. Copy the api key

Modify the command below:

1. Replace the url with your url
2. Replace the api key with your api key

$ curl  -X POST '{url}/indexes/{index_name}/documents?primaryKey={primary_key}  -H 'Content-Type: application/json'  -H 'Authorization: Bearer {API Keys}'  --data-json @data.json

Conclusion

This guide provided instructions to host your own instance of Meilisearch using Coolify.

This article was written by Ahmad Adel. Ahmad is a freelance writer and also a backend developer.