Flarum Supports Chinese Keyword Searches Using the Database Search Engine

Flarum itself is not very friendly to Chinese. As versions have evolved, it has gradually begun to optimize support for Chinese, such as allowing Chinese usernames to be registered, which is indeed quite useful. However, the latest beta11 version still does not support searching Chinese content. Fortunately, MySQL has supported full-text indexes for Chinese and Japanese since version 5.7.

In addition, Flarum developers have also said that future versions will use the ElasticSearch distributed full-text search engine, because ElasticSearch is better than this method. However, it has still not been adopted to date. Please note that this method will affect database performance to a certain extent.

Method

Modify mysql.cnf and add:

[mysqld]
ngram_token_size=2

After making the modification, you need to rebuild the FULLTEXT indexes:

ALTER TABLE flarum_posts DROP INDEX content;
CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX content ON `flarum_posts` (`content`) WITH PARSER ngram;

ALTER TABLE flarum_discussions DROP INDEX title;
CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX title ON `flarum_discussions` (`title`) WITH PARSER ngram;

After rebuilding them, clear the cache in the Flarum admin panel. You will then be able to search Chinese content, including article titles and article content.