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Nextra includes a full-page search feature powered by Pagefind — a static search library that indexes your HTML output at build time and serves results entirely client-side with no server or external API required. Search is enabled by default; you only need to install Pagefind and add a postbuild script to activate it.

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Setup

1
Install Pagefind as a dev dependency
2
Add pagefind to your project’s dev dependencies:
3
npm
npm i -D pagefind
yarn
yarn add -D pagefind
pnpm
pnpm add -D pagefind
4
Add a postbuild script
5
Pagefind indexes .html files, so the indexing must run after your Next.js build completes. Add a postbuild script to package.json:
6
Server Builds
{
  "scripts": {
    "build": "next build",
    "postbuild": "pagefind --site .next/server/app --output-path public/_pagefind"
  }
}
Static Exports
{
  "scripts": {
    "build": "next build",
    "postbuild": "pagefind --site out --output-path out/_pagefind"
  }
}
7
npm, yarn, and pnpm all run postbuild automatically after the build script finishes.
8
Ignore generated index files
9
Add the generated _pagefind/ directory to your .gitignore so index files are not committed to version control:
10
_pagefind/
11
Verify the setup
12
Run your build and check that a _pagefind/ directory exists in public/ (server builds) or out/ (static exports). Start your app and use the search bar to confirm results appear correctly.
13
npm
npm run build
yarn
yarn build
pnpm
pnpm build

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How It Works

When search is enabled, Nextra adds a data-pagefind-body attribute to the <main> element of each page. Pagefind uses this attribute to identify the content regions to index, so only the page body is searchable — not navigation, headers, or footers.

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Configuration

Search is enabled by default. Configure it in next.config.mjs by passing a search option to nextra(): 
import nextra from 'nextra'

const withNextra = nextra({
  search: false
})

export default withNextra({})

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Exclude Code Blocks from Index

By default, code blocks are included in the search index. To keep search enabled but exclude code block content, set codeblocks: false: 
import nextra from 'nextra'

const withNextra = nextra({
  search: { codeblocks: false }
})

export default withNextra({})
When codeblocks: false is set, Nextra adds data-pagefind-ignore="all" to every <pre> element so Pagefind skips them during indexing.
The default value of search is { codeblocks: false }, meaning code blocks are excluded from the index unless you explicitly set search: true or search: { codeblocks: true }.

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Configuration Reference

OptionTypeDefaultDescription
searchboolean | { codeblocks: boolean }{ codeblocks: false }Enable/disable search or configure code indexing.
search.codeblocksbooleanfalseWhether to include code blocks in the search index.

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Alternative Search Providers

Pagefind works great for most documentation sites, but Nextra also supports replacing the default search with other providers.

Typesense

Self-hostable, typo-tolerant search engine with a community-maintained adapter. Ideal for large documentation sites that need faceted search.

AI Search (Inkeep)

Add an AI-powered chat assistant to your docs using Inkeep, letting users ask natural language questions instead of typing keywords.

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