Hi @JCombee, thanks for your submission. Adding the external: true flag for the volumes is backwards incompatible and would mean that every environment someone uses will break when pulling this change in.

Let's see if we can make it work both ways! Maybe we can have a flag to identify that it is set as an external volume.
This could work for everything and making it more generic, which then can also be applied to mysql

Is this something you want to look at or do you want me to test this out for you?

What is search.php? That's not Magento default I think?

@JeroenBoersma search.php is a PHP file to speed up autocomplete search so it doesn't go through the whole Magento 2 application. See https://github.com/Web200/magento-elasticsuite-autocomplete/blob/main/src/pub/search.php