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Recommended Module Stacks

When to Use

Use this when planning which modules to install for your site's search functionality.

Decision

Site Size Backend Key Modules
Small (<10K items) Database search_api, search_api_db
Medium (10K-100K) Solr 8/9 + search_api_solr, facets, better_exposed_filters, search_api_autocomplete
Large/Enterprise (100K+) Solr Cloud + search_api_fast, Solr Cloud config
Decoupled Any + jsonapi_search_api OR search_api_typesense

Pattern

Small sites: 

composer require drupal/search_api
drush en search_api search_api_db
# Enable ALL processors (tokenizer, stemmer, stopwords, etc.)
# Cron batch size: 100

Medium sites: 

composer require drupal/search_api drupal/search_api_solr
composer require drupal/facets drupal/better_exposed_filters
composer require drupal/search_api_autocomplete
drush en search_api search_api_solr search_api_solr_admin
drush en facets facets_exposed_filters better_exposed_filters
# DISABLE: tokenizer, stemmer, stopwords, ignore case (Solr handles these)
# Solr Terms suggester for autocomplete; Cron batch size: 50

Large / Enterprise: 

# Same as medium, plus:
composer require drupal/search_api_fast
# Solr Cloud, search_api_fast with workers=4
# Cron batch size: 25; Solr index-only mode
# Cache warming for popular queries

Decoupled: 

# Add to any stack above:
composer require drupal/jsonapi_search_api
# OR for Typesense instant search:
composer require drupal/search_api_typesense

Common Mistakes

  • Wrong: Using DB backend + all processors for a 50K+ site → Right: Switch to Solr. DB will degrade severely.
  • Wrong: Not disabling Solr-duplicate processors on medium/large stacks → Right: Always disable Tokenizer, Stemmer, Stopwords, Ignore case when using Solr.

See Also