Pagefind is a fully static search library that aims to perform well on large sites, while using as little of your users’ bandwidth as possible, and without hosting any infrastructure.
The full documentation on using Pagefind can be found at https://pagefind.app/.
This packages houses a wrapper for running the precompiled Pagefind binary, and also serves as a NodeJS indexing library that can be integrated into existing tools.
This is the recommended way of running Pagefind on a static site.
npx pagefind --site "public"
For more details on using the Pagefind binary, see Installing and running Pagefind, and the rest of the Pagefind documentation.
This package also provides an interface to the Pagefind binary directly as a package you can import.
import * as pagefind from "pagefind";
// Create a Pagefind search index to work with
const { index } = await pagefind.createIndex();
// Index all HTML files in a directory
await index.addDirectory({
path: "public"
});
// Add extra content
await index.addCustomRecord({
url: "/resume.pdf",
content: "Aenean lacinia bibendum nulla sed consectetur",
language: "en",
});
// Get the index files in-memory
const { files } = await index.getFiles();
// Or, write the index to disk
await index.writeFiles({
outputPath: "public/pagefind"
});
For more details on using Pagefind as a library, see Indexing content using the NodeJS API.
v1.4.0 (September 1, 2025)
justfile, and improved CONTRIBUTING.md (hint hint)👋 from @bglw — I thought I'd add a new section to these release notes talking about what's next.
The biggest item on my list is to improve the relevance of the Pagefind search results. With the current setup, you can tweak enough settings to get decent results for a given site, but it needs to better meet the goal of working more-than-good-enough out of the box.
The second-biggest item is to fill out the Modular UI and transition the default Pagefind experience to use that. This has been pending for a long time, and will be a much better base for those who wish to customize their search more than the Default UI currently allows.
Releases also now trigger a GitHub Discussion to be created, so please drop any general thoughts, comments, or feedback there 🙂
FAQs
Implement search on any static website.
The npm package pagefind receives a total of 165,852 weekly downloads. As such, pagefind popularity was classified as popular.
We found that pagefind demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
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