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Comment by swanson | Hacker News Reader

Here's another approach: Make a templated JSON file that mimics a database-backend. When you generate the site (or just push to a GitHub Pages repo), the JSON file will be populated with the "search index" of your site. Something like this: https://github.com/swanson/lagom/blob/master/site.json

Then you can use whatever Javascript you'd like to search through your pages by pulling down the JSON file into memory and slicing and dicing to your heart's content.

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This is really an approach that should get more attention.

People know all about database-backed websites (with an AJAX/REST server), and static-generated sites (with no server at all.)

But there's a middle-ground where you statically generate precomputed AJAX/REST responses to any query you could make, shove them in an S3 bucket and maybe put a CDN (e.g. Cloudflare) in front of it, and then treat that as your "server", building a traditional AJAXy frontend to talk to it. Scales nigh-on infinitely.

The best part is, it's not necessarily read-only! You can write a "real" server, too, that just handles updates. When it receives a request, GET the old version of the object it's modifying from S3 (no need for a database!), patch it up with the AJAXed-in data, and PUT it back. (And follow it up with a CDN single-file-purge API call, if it's relevant.)

pretty much the approach taken with lunr.js (or you can store the search index itself, which is also json. http://lunrjs.com/

I like this approach a lot. If you have hundreds or thousands of posts, it would also be pretty easy to only append new posts to the JSON file instead of regenerating the entire thing.

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