Pause a rule without deleting it

Stop a search rule from applying while keeping its configuration, so you can turn it back on later.

A campaign ends earlier than planned, or a rule behaves in a way you did not expect in production. You want it to stop applying right away, but you do not want to rebuild it from memory next week. Pausing a rule keeps every condition and action in place and only stops it from running at search time.

Pause a rule from the Meilisearch Cloud dashboard

Open your project in the Meilisearch Cloud dashboard and select the Search rules tab. Find your rule in the list, then click the Active toggle in its row.

Click the toggle again to run the rule once more. Nothing else changes, so the rule applies exactly as it did before.

Pause a rule on a self-hosted instance

Search rules must be turned on before you call the /dynamic-search-rules routes, otherwise Meilisearch returns an error. See Create your first rule.

cURL

curl \
  -X PATCH 'MEILISEARCH_URL/dynamic-search-rules/summer-sale' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer API_KEY' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data-binary '{
    "active": false
  }'

The PATCH route only modifies the fields you send, so your conditions and actions stay untouched. Send "active": true to run the rule again.

Meilisearch answers with a summarized task containing a taskUid, because updating a rule is an asynchronous operation:

{
  "taskUid": 45,
  "indexUid": ".meili_dsr",
  "status": "enqueued",
  "type": "dsrUpdate",
  "enqueuedAt": "2026-06-12T14:03:47.665870469Z"
}

The rule stops applying to searches once this task reaches the succeeded status. To follow its progress, pass the taskUid to the task API.

Pause or delete

A paused rule stays in your list, keeps its definition, and is skipped at search time. Deleting a rule with DELETE /dynamic-search-rules/{uid} is final: you have to create it again from scratch.

Pause the rules you may need again, such as the campaigns that come back every year. Delete the ones that are wrong or that you will never use again.

Next steps

List or filter existing rules

Find the rules to pause or to turn back on

Boost documents

Rank a selection of documents higher during a campaign

Hide documents

Remove documents from the results without reindexing

API reference

Full request and response shapes