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Recommended Module Stacks

When to Use

When planning which modules to install for your site's search functionality.

Decision: By Site Size

Small Sites (< 10K items): 

composer require drupal/search_api
drush en search_api search_api_db

# Optional:
composer require drupal/facets drupal/search_api_autocomplete
- Database backend is sufficient - Enable ALL processors (tokenizer, stemmer, stopwords, etc.) - Cron batch size: 100

Medium Sites (10K-100K items): 

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
drush en search_api_autocomplete
- Solr 9 or 10 backend - DISABLE redundant processors (tokenizer, stemmer, stopwords, ignore case) - Use Facets Exposed Filters + BEF - Solr Terms suggester for autocomplete - Cron batch size: 50

Large / Enterprise Sites (100K+ items): 

# Same as medium — parallel indexing needs no extra module on Solr:
drush search-api-solr:index-parallel my_index --threads=8 --batch-size=100
- Solr Cloud for horizontal scaling - search-api-solr:index-parallel for parallel indexing (search_api_fast only if the backend is not Solr) - Solr index-only mode (retrieve data from Solr, skip entity loads) - Dedicated "Search index" view mode - Cache warming for popular queries - Frequent cron (every 1-2 min) + drush reindexing strategy - Cron batch size: 25

Decoupled / Headless: 

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

See Also