Manticore Speaks MySQL - So I Made It a Laravel Database Driver Instead of a Scout Engine

The problem I've been working with Manticore Search for about two years at EricaPRO , building the search layer for two financial data platforms. For the past year, that work has been a Laravel API. Manticore was never the problem. It's fast and it's stable. The problem was the gap between Manticore and Laravel. I had already built a package for this — laravel-manticore-search , a fluent builder over Manticore's HTTP/JSON API. It works, and it's still in use. But it's a client wrapper. Every feature had to be implemented manually. Every new filter or facet meant more custom architecture around the client, and none of the things Laravel gives you for free — models, migrations, pagination, casts — applied to it. Scout doesn't close that gap either. Scout gives you search() . No full query builder, no migrations for your indexes, sync is your problem. That's not a criticism — Scout abstracts over engines with completely different APIs, so it exposes the lowest common denominator. It just wasn't what I needed. What I needed was simple to describe and annoying to not have: something plug and play. Something Laravel way. Point Eloquent at Manticore and use Eloquent. The insight Manticore speaks the MySQL wire protocol. Out of the box, port 9306. You can connect to it with any MySQL client and run SQL. I had been using that port for two years without thinking about what it meant for Laravel. Because here's the thing: all of Eloquent — models, query builder, migrations, pagination, chunking — sits on top of a Connection and a Grammar . The grammar compiles builder calls into SQL for a specific dialect. That's the entire mechanism behind Laravel supporting MySQL, Postgres, SQLite and SQL Server with one codebase. So the real question was never "how do I re-implement Eloquent on top of Manticore's client?" It was "how thin can a Manticore grammar be?" If Manticore accepts MySQL-protocol connections and mostly-MySQL SQL, then a Laravel database driver — a custom connection plu