Elastic Scout Driver

Elastic Scout Driver is an Elasticsearch engine for Laravel Scout. It plugs into Scout’s driver abstraction so that Eloquent models marked as searchable are indexed into Elasticsearch and queried through the standard Scout API, without writing raw Elasticsearch requests.

The engine maps Scout’s index, update, delete, and search operations onto Elasticsearch documents via the elastic-adapter layer, converting hits back into Eloquent models or lazy collections. It supports the usual Scout workflow of importing models, keeping the index in sync on save and delete, and running full-text queries with pagination, making Elasticsearch a drop-in search backend for existing Scout-based applications.

What You Get

• A Scout engine that indexes searchable models into Elasticsearch
• Automatic syncing of documents on model create, update, and delete
• Standard Scout search with pagination and lazy collections
• Document and model factories for customizing indexing and hydration
• Laravel service-provider auto-registration

Common Use Cases

• Adding Elasticsearch-backed full-text search to Eloquent models
• Migrating an existing Scout app from another driver to Elasticsearch
• Keeping a search index in sync with database records automatically

Under The Hood

Architecture - The heart of the package is a single Engine class (namespace Elastic\ScoutDriver) that extends Laravel Scout’s abstract Engine. It composes an elastic-adapter DocumentManager and IndexManager for writes/searches and delegates transformation work to injected DocumentFactoryInterface, ModelFactoryInterface, and SearchParametersFactoryInterface implementations. Scout’s update, delete, search, paginate, and map calls are translated into Elasticsearch document and search operations, and hits are hydrated back into Eloquent models or lazy collections.

Tech Stack - Pure PHP (php ^8.3) with strict types, built on babenkoivan/elastic-adapter ^5.0 and laravel/scout. Configuration (like refresh_documents) is read from Laravel config, and the package is PSR-4 autoloaded and distributed via Packagist with CI running tests.

Code Quality - The engine is compact and interface-driven, isolating serialization and hydration behind factory contracts so behavior can be swapped without touching the engine. Strict typing and small dependencies keep it readable; the test suite is maintained though recent commit activity is low, reflecting a stable design.

API Design - For consumers the API is essentially Scout itself: add the Searchable trait, set the Scout driver to elastic, and call Model::search(...). There is virtually no package-specific surface to learn, and the factory interfaces provide clean extension points for teams that need custom indexing or query shaping.