Meilisearch Importer

Efficiently import large CSV, NDJSON, or JSON datasets into Meilisearch using the official CLI tool.

The official meilisearch-importer is a high-performance CLI tool for bulk importing large datasets into Meilisearch. It handles millions of documents with automatic retry logic and progress tracking.

Features

• Import CSV, NDJSON, and JSON (array of objects) files
• Handle datasets from thousands to 40+ million documents
• Automatic retry logic for failed batches
• Real-time progress tracking with ETA
• Configurable batch sizes for performance tuning

Prerequisites

• A Meilisearch instance (Cloud or self-hosted)
• One of:
  • Rust/Cargo installed (for building from source)
  • Pre-built binary from releases

Installation

Cargo (Rust)

cargo install meilisearch-importer

Pre-built binary

Download the latest release from GitHub Releases for your platform.

# Example for Linux
wget https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-importer/releases/latest/download/meilisearch-importer-linux-amd64
chmod +x meilisearch-importer-linux-amd64
mv meilisearch-importer-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/meilisearch-importer

Basic usage

Import a CSV file:

meilisearch-importer \
  --url "${MEILISEARCH_URL}" \
  --api-key "${MEILISEARCH_KEY}" \
  --index movies \
  --file movies.csv

Set your environment variables:

export MEILISEARCH_URL="https://your-instance.meilisearch.io"
export MEILISEARCH_KEY="your_api_key"

Supported formats

CSV

meilisearch-importer --index products --file products.csv

CSV files must have a header row. The importer automatically detects column types.

NDJSON (Newline-delimited JSON)

meilisearch-importer --index products --file products.ndjson

Each line must be a valid JSON object:

{"id": 1, "title": "Product A", "price": 29.99}
{"id": 2, "title": "Product B", "price": 39.99}

JSON array

meilisearch-importer --index products --file products.json

File must contain an array of objects:

[
  {"id": 1, "title": "Product A", "price": 29.99},
  {"id": 2, "title": "Product B", "price": 39.99}
]

Configuration options

Option	Description	Default
--url	Meilisearch URL	http://localhost:7700
--api-key	Meilisearch API key	None
--index	Target index name	Required
--file	Input file path	Required
--batch-size	Documents per batch	1000
--primary-key	Primary key field	Auto-detected

Performance tuning

Batch size

Adjust batch size based on your document size and network:

# Smaller documents: larger batches
meilisearch-importer --index logs --file logs.ndjson --batch-size 5000

# Larger documents: smaller batches
meilisearch-importer --index articles --file articles.json --batch-size 100

Primary key

Specify the primary key if auto-detection fails:

meilisearch-importer --index products --file products.csv --primary-key product_id

Example: Import a large dataset

Import 10 million products with progress tracking:

meilisearch-importer \
  --url "https://ms-xxx.meilisearch.io" \
  --api-key "your_master_key" \
  --index products \
  --file products.ndjson \
  --batch-size 2000

Output:

Importing products.ndjson to index 'products'...
[████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░] 52% (5.2M/10M) ETA: 12m 34s

After import

Verify your import:

curl "${MEILISEARCH_URL}/indexes/products/stats" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${MEILISEARCH_KEY}"

Test a search:

curl "${MEILISEARCH_URL}/indexes/products/search" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${MEILISEARCH_KEY}" \
  -d '{"q": "test"}'

Next steps

Configure settings

Set up searchable and filterable attributes

Debug performance

Identify and fix indexing bottlenecks

Resources

• meilisearch-importer on GitHub
• Releases