Xapian backend for Django-Haystack

https://travis-ci.org/notanumber/xapian-haystack.svg?branch=master

Xapian-haystack is a backend of Django-Haystack for the Xapian search engine. Thanks for checking it out.

You can find more information about Xapian here.

Features

Xapian-Haystack provides all the standard features of Haystack:

Weighting
Faceted search (date, query, etc.)
Sorting
Spelling suggestions

Requirements

Python 2.4+ (Python 3.3 not support yet).
Django 1.5+
Django-Haystack 2.0.X
Xapian 1.0.13+

In particular, we build this backend on Travis using:

Python 2.7.6
Django 1.6.4
Django-Haystack (latest)
Xapian 1.2.8 (libxapian22)

Installation

First you need to install Xapian in your machine. We recommend installing it on the virtual environment using this gist: activate the virtual environment and run the script.

You can test if the installation was successful by running:

python -c "import xapian"

Finally, install Xapian-Haystack by running:

pip install git+https://github.com/notanumber/xapian-haystack.git

Configuration

Xapian is configured as other backends of Haystack. You have to define the connection to the database, which is done to a path to a directory, e.g:

HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'xapian_backend.XapianEngine',
        'PATH': os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'xapian_index')
    },
}

The backend has the following optional settings:

HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_LANGUAGE: the stemming language; the default is english and the list of available languages can be found here.
HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_WEIGHTING_SCHEME: a tuple with parameters to be passed to the weighting scheme BM25. By default, it uses the same parameters as Xapian recommends; this setting allows you to change them.
HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_FLAGS: the options used to parse AutoQueries; the default is FLAG_PHRASE | FLAG_BOOLEAN | FLAG_LOVEHATE | FLAG_WILDCARD | FLAG_PURE_NOT See here for more information on what they mean.

Testing

Xapian-Haystack has a test suite in continuous deployment in Travis. The script .travis.yml contains all the steps required to run the test suite.

Other way is to clone Django-Haystack, copy the content of the tests/ folder of Xapian-Haystack to the tests/ folder of Haystack, and copy xapian_backend.py to haystack/backends/ folder.

The tests can then be run from the folder tests/ using:

django-admin.py test --settings=xapian_settings xapian_tests

Source

The source code can be found in github.

Credits

Xapian-Haystack is maintained by Jorge C. Leitão; David Sauve was the main contributor of Xapian-Haystack and Xapian-Haystack was originally funded by Trapeze.

License

Xapian-haystack is free software licenced under GNU General Public Licence v2 and Copyright (c) 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 David Sauve, 2009, 2010 Trapeze, 2014 Jorge C. Leitão. It may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.

Questions, Comments, Concerns:

Feel free to open an issue here or pull request your work.

You can ask questions on the django-haystack mailing list or in the irc #haystack.

josezambrana/xapian-haystack