Backend Support

Supported Backends

Backend Capabilities

Solr

Complete & included with Haystack.

  • Full SearchQuerySet support
  • Automatic query building
  • “More Like This” functionality
  • Term Boosting
  • Faceting
  • Stored (non-indexed) fields
  • Highlighting
  • Spatial search
  • Requires: pysolr (2.0.13+) & Solr 3.5+

Elasticsearch

Complete & included with Haystack.

  • Full SearchQuerySet support
  • Automatic query building
  • “More Like This” functionality
  • Term Boosting
  • Faceting (up to 100 facets)
  • Stored (non-indexed) fields
  • Highlighting
  • Spatial search
  • Requires: pyelasticsearch 0.4+ & Elasticsearch 0.17.7+

Whoosh

Complete & included with Haystack.

  • Full SearchQuerySet support
  • Automatic query building
  • “More Like This” functionality
  • Term Boosting
  • Stored (non-indexed) fields
  • Highlighting
  • Requires: whoosh (2.0.0+)

Xapian

Complete & available as a third-party download.

  • Full SearchQuerySet support
  • Automatic query building
  • “More Like This” functionality
  • Term Boosting
  • Faceting
  • Stored (non-indexed) fields
  • Highlighting
  • Requires: Xapian 1.0.5+ & python-xapian 1.0.5+
  • Backend can be downloaded here: xapian-haystack

Backend Support Matrix

Backend SearchQuerySet Support Auto Query Building More Like This Term Boost Faceting Stored Fields Highlighting Spatial
Solr Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Elasticsearch Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Whoosh Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes No
Xapian Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes (plugin) No

Wishlist

The following are search backends that would be nice to have in Haystack but are licensed in a way that prevents them from being officially bundled. If the community expresses interest in any of these, there may be future development.

Sphinx

This backend is unlikely to be built. Sphinx is pretty gimpy & doesn’t do blended search results across all models the way the other engines can. Very limited featureset as well.

  • Full SearchQuerySet support
  • Automatic query building
  • Term Boosting
  • Stored (non-indexed) fields
  • Highlighting
  • Requires: sphinxapi.py (Comes with Sphinx)

Project Versions

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