Should keyword search work when viewing a fully offline site from file://?

[glassjaw]

I'm currently testing out migrating an offline knowledge base to docmd, but I've noticed that the keyword search (and semantic search docmd-search) don't load when I view any html page locally from file://. Is this behavior expected? Will I need to deploy a site to use the search functionality? Using windows & edge at work if that's relevant.

[mgks]

Search does not work over file:// because both keyword and semantic search use fetch() to load their index files. Modern browsers intentionally block fetch() requests to local file:// resources as part of their security model.

To test an offline build locally, serve the generated site over HTTP instead:

npx serve site

A future enhancement could inline the keyword search index into the generated HTML for offline builds, allowing keyword search to work without fetch(). However, this would significantly increase page size, so it's not currently planned.