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Once your sharded cluster is set up, you can modify the topology without restarting instances. All topology changes go through PATCH /network on the leader instance.

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Add a remote

Use addRemotes to add a new instance to the network without rewriting the entire remotes configuration: 
curl \
  -X PATCH 'MEILISEARCH_URL/network' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer MEILISEARCH_KEY' \
  --data-binary '{
    "addRemotes": {
      "ms-03": {
        "url": "http://ms-03.example.com:7703",
        "searchApiKey": "SEARCH_KEY_03"
      }
    }
  }'
After adding the remote, update your shard configuration to assign shards to it.

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Remove a remote

Use removeRemotes to take an instance out of the network: 
curl \
  -X PATCH 'MEILISEARCH_URL/network' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer MEILISEARCH_KEY' \
  --data-binary '{
    "removeRemotes": ["ms-03"]
  }'
Before removing a remote, make sure its shards are replicated on other remotes. Removing the only remote holding a shard makes that data unavailable for network searches.

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Update shard assignments

Reassign shards to different remotes by sending a new shards configuration: 
curl \
  -X PATCH 'MEILISEARCH_URL/network' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer MEILISEARCH_KEY' \
  --data-binary '{
    "shards": {
      "shard-a": { "remotes": ["ms-00", "ms-01", "ms-03"] },
      "shard-b": { "remotes": ["ms-01", "ms-02"] },
      "shard-c": { "remotes": ["ms-02", "ms-03"] }
    }
  }'

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Filter searches by shard

Target specific shards using the _shard filter in search requests: 
curl \
  -X POST 'MEILISEARCH_URL/indexes/movies/search' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer MEILISEARCH_KEY' \
  --data-binary '{
    "q": "batman",
    "useNetwork": true,
    "filter": "_shard = \"shard-a\""
  }'
Supported _shard filter operators:
SyntaxBehavior
_shard = "shard-a"Results from shard-a only
_shard != "shard-a"Results from all shards except shard-a
_shard IN ["shard-a", "shard-b"]Results from both shard-a and shard-b

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Private network security

By default, Meilisearch blocks requests to non-global IP addresses. If your instances communicate over a private network, configure the --experimental-allowed-ip-networks flag on each instance: 
meilisearch --experimental-allowed-ip-networks 10.0.0.0/8,192.168.0.0/16
Only allow the CIDR ranges your instances actually use.

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Next steps

Replication and sharding overview

Understand the concepts behind sharding, replication, and network search.

Deployment overview

Deploy Meilisearch to production on various cloud providers.