Build a Spring Boot REST API with Full-Text Search using Hibernate Search

Search is one of the pillars of the web, and full-text search is one of the mandatory features that every website needs. But implementing such a feature is complex, and lots of skilled engineers have already thought hard about this topic. So let’s not reinvent the wheel, and use the battle-tested Hibernate Search library.

In this blog post, we are going to learn how to build a simple REST API endpoint in Spring boot with full-text search using Hibernate Search. We will only go through the basics, but Hibernate Search is a feature-rich library with many features going way beyond what we will see in this post. You can check everything that it provides in the official documentation https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/search/reference/en-US/html_single/#gettingstarted-framework.

Project Bootstrap

The first step is to generate the spring boot project using spring initializr. In this tutorial, We are using the spring CLI via SDKman, but it can easily be done using the web UI https://start.spring.io/ or directly through your IDEA https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/spring-boot.html.

To have a walkthrough of how to set up the CLI on your own machine, follow this guide…