Installation

Two commands, and nothing to configure before the first audit.

Requirements

• Craft CMS 5.3 or later
• PHP 8.2 or later
• MySQL or PostgreSQL — both are supported

Holmes adds no runtime dependencies. One check — the pending index queue — needs Craft 5.7 or later, because that is when Craft’s deferred index queue was added; on older installs it reports itself unavailable and is skipped rather than failing.

With Composer

composer require justinholtweb/craft-holmes
php craft plugin/install holmes

From the Plugin Store

Search for Holmes in the Craft Plugin Store and install it from there. It is free, so there is no licence to buy and no trial to start.

What installing does

It creates two tables — holmes_audits and holmes_issues — and adds a Holmes item to the control panel navigation. Nothing else changes. In particular:

• No content is touched, and no index rows are written or deleted.
• No queue jobs are created until you run a deep audit or a reindex.
• Search behaves exactly as it did before.

First run

Open Holmes → Overview to see what the index is made of, then Holmes → Audits → New audit and run a quick one. A quick audit is read-only and finishes in seconds even on a large site, so it is safe on production.

From the terminal, the equivalent is:

php craft holmes/index
php craft holmes/audit

Uninstalling

Uninstalling drops both Holmes tables and removes its permissions. The search index itself is left exactly as it is — anything Holmes reindexed stays reindexed, because Craft wrote it.