At Meilisearch, open-source has been part of our DNA since the very beginning, in 2019. We’ve always relied on our open-source community to build and grow our product.

Personally, I’ve been at Meilisearch for almost 6 years now. I started as a developer on the integration team, building our very first libraries for the community, collaborating with them on daily basis. Today, I’m Head of Engineering, and I’m still convinced that working with the open-source community is one of the best and safest ways to build a great product.

In this article, I’ll share what we’ve built with our open-source community over the past six years, and why it still matters today.

What does open-source contribution mean at Meilisearch?

Today, the Meilisearch GitHub organization gathers more than 60,000 stars across all our open-source repositories (with over 50,000 on the main Meilisearch repository alone).

I still remember when I joined Meilisearch and admired the Elasticsearch repository and its 40,000 stars. Today, Meilisearch has reached and even passed that milestone!

But stars are just the visible part of the story, and honestly, the easiest and least important part of building an open-source community.

In our GitHub organization, we have more than 30 repositories that have actively been receiving open-source contributions. And when we talk about "open-source contributions," we often think about code since it shows strong community interest. That’s why my articles will mostly focus on this type of contribution. But every interaction, big or small, improves the project, saves us time, and strengthens the product: creating issues, commenting, reviewing pull requests, all these actions help the product move forward, and they’re just as important.

A few key numbers

Over the past 5 years, from 2020 to 2024 included, we’ve merged more than 1,800 external pull requests (PR). That’s about one PR every single day for 5 years!

We always knew the community was a key part of our story, but these numbers really prove it.

And it’s not just something from our early days. In 2024, almost 30% of merged PRs in our open-source repositories came from external contributors. This part was only 15% in 2021!

Another interesting fact: most of these contributions weren’t on the main Meilisearch repository! About 70% were on our integration libraries (the clients and SDKs we provide for different languages). These integrations are crucial for the Meilisearch experience (90% of users use one), but cover so many languages that we couldn’t handle them all without help. The community’s involvement here has been absolutely critical.

Recurring & cross contributions

Once you start attracting contributors to your project, you naturally want them to stay. That’s why it’s important to look at how often contributors come back and stay involved in your open-source project.

Over the years, we’ve had almost 1000 unique contributors at the Meilisearch’s organization. About one-third of them contributed more than once, and 15% even contributed to more than one repository. This shows that we offer a good contribution experience (something we often hear directly from our users).

Our most active contributor, @sanders41, made an impressive 119 pull requests over 4 years, including 50 pull requests just in 2021! 😱

At Meilisearch, we offer a variety of repositories to contribute to. Some are complex, like the main Meilisearch Rust codebase. Others are smaller and more accessible, like Charabia (our tokenizer library), our integrations & libraries or our documentation. This makes it easy for anyone to start their open-source journey with us, whether they are experienced developers or just getting started.

Our contributors come from different backgrounds. Some are interested in learning a new programming language. Others are passionate about open-source and want to support projects they believe in. Some contributors use Meilisearch for their personal projects, while others contribute during their working hours because they use Meilisearch at work.

What we build behind the numbers…

At first glance, it could be easy to think that most contributions are simple documentation fixes. But that’s far from the truth. Our documentation is one of the most important parts of our product, and we maintain very high quality standards for it. Every contribution to our docs is carefully reviewed, and only the best ones are merged.

Also, our most contributed repository is not a documentation project… it’s Meilisearch itself! Written in Rust and containing more than 30,000 lines of code, it’s a complex and demanding project. Contributing there is far from easy, and yet many contributors are actively involved! Today, for each release of Meilisearch, around 8 external contributors take part; a sign of a strong and engaged open-source community, although the complexity of the project!

Another common assumption is that most contributions are tiny or “just typo fixes”. In reality, every contribution, even a small one, helps improve the product. But what’s even more impressive is that most external PRs we got bring real value through meaningful fixes and additions.

Here are major examples of what we achieved thanks to the community:

Charabia, our tokenizer library, was largely built with help from contributors speaking languages other than English and French (our main languages internally).
The ability to connect Meilisearch with Prometheus: initially started by a Meilisearch developer, then improved continuously by the community.
SDKs & integrations improvements: our integrations are mostly maintained and improved by contributors. Even when we lacked the time and bandwidth internally, the community kept the SDKs alive and high-quality. Today, many of the best PRs on the SDKs come from the community. We mostly supervise and review.

Our proudest achievement: hiring from our community

From the outside, our 50k stars might seem like the biggest success. But for me, the proudest achievement is that we hired one of our contributors as a full-time developer more than three years ago… and he’s still with us today!

Hiring someone from the open-source community is amazing, especially for a remote company like Meilisearch:

You already know how they work.
You see their code quality and communication style.
Onboarding is fast and efficient, especially in a remote-first company like ours.

And we’re about to welcome a new intern who started contributing when he was still in high school! He’s now studying computer science at the University, and will be part of the Meilisearch journey in another way for a couple of months.

We are proud to stay connected with contributors over time and support them in their professional growth. The Meilisearch team is currently full, but if I had to hire developers, I already know I would contact our main contributors first. We appreciate keeping in touch with many other contributors, following their careers, celebrating their milestones, and sometimes meeting them in person (although it’s rare, that’s the drawback of open-source: the community is spread all over the world!).

Giving back to open-source

We’ve received a lot from the open-source community, so it’s important for us, as a company, to give back in multiple ways, as much as we can:

Every Meilisearch employee can support open-source projects financially (up to €50/month).
We heavily use open-source libraries, and sometimes Meilisearch is even one of the main users, like for Actix. Thanks to Meilisearch, these libraries can improve their product by pushing the limits of their own project with us.
We contribute back to projects, like Lindera (our Japanese tokenizer) or LMDB (our internal database). Also, Kero, CTO of Meilisarch, is the maintainer of Roaring-rs, the Rust version Roaring Bitmap.
We open-source the tools we build internally when they can be useful for others, like:
- Segment, the Rust library for Segment tool (forked and improved from an abandoned project)
- Cargo-flaky, a Rust tool to spot flaky tests

A heartfelt thank you!

Building an open-source project like Meilisearch has never been just about writing code. It’s about building a community: a group of people who care about the product, contribute their ideas, and help move it forward, one step at a time.

Looking back over the past six years, it’s clear we couldn’t have achieved everything we did without our contributors. They helped us grow faster, make better decisions, and create a stronger, more reliable product. They challenged us, supported us, and sometimes even joined us as full team members.

We are deeply grateful for everything the community has brought us. And we are proud to keep giving back whenever we can.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

I’m already working on a follow-up article with our top tips and good practices for managing open-source projects. Stay tuned! 🚀

Six years working with the open-source community