Getting Started with Haystack¶
Search is a topic of ever increasing importance. Users increasing rely on search to separate signal from noise and find what they’re looking for quickly. In addition, search can provide insight into what things are popular (many searches), what things are difficult to find on the site and ways you can improve the site better.
To this end, Haystack tries to make integrating custom search as easy as possible while being flexible/powerful enough to handle more advanced use cases.
Haystack is a reusable app (that is, it relies only on its own code and focuses
on providing just search) that plays nicely with both apps you control as well as
third-party apps (such as django.contrib.*
) without having to modify the
sources.
Haystack also does pluggable backends (much like Django’s database layer), so virtually all of the code you write ought to be portable between whichever search engine you choose.
Note
If you hit a stumbling block, there is both a mailing list and #haystack on irc.freenode.net to get help.
Note
You can participate in and/or track the development of Haystack by subscribing to the development mailing list.
This tutorial assumes that you have a basic familiarity with the various major parts of Django (models/forms/views/settings/URLconfs) and tailored to the typical use case. There are shortcuts available as well as hooks for much more advanced setups, but those will not be covered here.
For example purposes, we’ll be adding search functionality to a simple
note-taking application. Here is myapp/models.py
:
from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
class Note(models.Model):
user = models.ForeignKey(User)
pub_date = models.DateTimeField()
title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
body = models.TextField()
def __unicode__(self):
return self.title
Finally, before starting with Haystack, you will want to choose a search backend to get started. There is a quick-start guide to Installing Search Engines, though you may want to defer to each engine’s official instructions.
Installation¶
Use your favorite Python package manager to install the app from PyPI, e.g.
Example:
pip install django-haystack
Configuration¶
Add Haystack To INSTALLED_APPS
¶
As with most Django applications, you should add Haystack to the
INSTALLED_APPS
within your settings file (usually settings.py
).
Example:
INSTALLED_APPS = [
'django.contrib.admin',
'django.contrib.auth',
'django.contrib.contenttypes',
'django.contrib.sessions',
'django.contrib.sites',
# Added.
'haystack',
# Then your usual apps...
'blog',
]
Modify Your settings.py
¶
Within your settings.py
, you’ll need to add a setting to indicate where your
site configuration file will live and which backend to use, as well as other
settings for that backend.
HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS
is a required setting and should be at least one of
the following:
Solr¶
Example:
HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'haystack.backends.solr_backend.SolrEngine',
'URL': 'http://127.0.0.1:8983/solr'
# ...or for multicore...
# 'URL': 'http://127.0.0.1:8983/solr/mysite',
},
}
Elasticsearch¶
Example:
HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'haystack.backends.elasticsearch_backend.ElasticsearchSearchEngine',
'URL': 'http://127.0.0.1:9200/',
'INDEX_NAME': 'haystack',
},
}
Whoosh¶
Requires setting PATH
to the place on your filesystem where the
Whoosh index should be located. Standard warnings about permissions and keeping
it out of a place your webserver may serve documents out of apply.
Example:
import os
HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'haystack.backends.whoosh_backend.WhooshEngine',
'PATH': os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'whoosh_index'),
},
}
Xapian¶
First, install the Xapian backend (via http://github.com/notanumber/xapian-haystack/tree/master) per the instructions included with the backend.
Requires setting PATH
to the place on your filesystem where the
Xapian index should be located. Standard warnings about permissions and keeping
it out of a place your webserver may serve documents out of apply.
Example:
import os
HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'xapian_backend.XapianEngine',
'PATH': os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'xapian_index'),
},
}
Simple¶
The simple
backend using very basic matching via the database itself. It’s
not recommended for production use but it will return results.
Warning
This backend does NOT work like the other backends do. Data preparation does nothing & advanced filtering calls do not work. You really probably don’t want this unless you’re in an environment where you just want to silence Haystack.
Example:
HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'haystack.backends.simple_backend.SimpleEngine',
},
}
Handling Data¶
Creating SearchIndexes
¶
SearchIndex
objects are the way Haystack determines what data should be
placed in the search index and handles the flow of data in. You can think of
them as being similar to Django Models
or Forms
in that they are
field-based and manipulate/store data.
You generally create a unique SearchIndex
for each type of Model
you
wish to index, though you can reuse the same SearchIndex
between different
models if you take care in doing so and your field names are very standardized.
To build a SearchIndex
, all that’s necessary is to subclass both
indexes.SearchIndex
& indexes.Indexable
,
define the fields you want to store data with and define a get_model
method.
We’ll create the following NoteIndex
to correspond to our Note
model. This code generally goes in a search_indexes.py
file within the app
it applies to, though that is not required. This allows
Haystack to automatically pick it up. The NoteIndex
should look like:
import datetime
from haystack import indexes
from myapp.models import Note
class NoteIndex(indexes.SearchIndex, indexes.Indexable):
text = indexes.CharField(document=True, use_template=True)
author = indexes.CharField(model_attr='user')
pub_date = indexes.DateTimeField(model_attr='pub_date')
def get_model(self):
return Note
def index_queryset(self, using=None):
"""Used when the entire index for model is updated."""
return self.get_model().objects.filter(pub_date__lte=datetime.datetime.now())
Every SearchIndex
requires there be one (and only one) field with
document=True
. This indicates to both Haystack and the search engine about
which field is the primary field for searching within.
Warning
When you choose a document=True
field, it should be consistently named
across all of your SearchIndex
classes to avoid confusing the backend.
The convention is to name this field text
.
There is nothing special about the text
field name used in all of the
examples. It could be anything; you could call it pink_polka_dot
and
it won’t matter. It’s simply a convention to call it text
.
Additionally, we’re providing use_template=True
on the text
field. This
allows us to use a data template (rather than error-prone concatenation) to
build the document the search engine will index. You’ll need to
create a new template inside your template directory called
search/indexes/myapp/note_text.txt
and place the following inside:
{{ object.title }}
{{ object.user.get_full_name }}
{{ object.body }}
In addition, we added several other fields (author
and pub_date
). These
are useful when you want to provide additional filtering options. Haystack comes
with a variety of SearchField
classes to handle most types of data.
A common theme is to allow admin users to add future content but have it not
display on the site until that future date is reached. We specify a custom
index_queryset
method to prevent those future items from being indexed.
Setting Up The Views¶
Add The SearchView
To Your URLconf¶
Within your URLconf, add the following line:
(r'^search/', include('haystack.urls')),
This will pull in the default URLconf for Haystack. It consists of a single
URLconf that points to a SearchView
instance. You can change this class’s
behavior by passing it any of several keyword arguments or override it entirely
with your own view.
Search Template¶
Your search template (search/search.html
for the default case) will likely
be very simple. The following is enough to get going (your template/block names
will likely differ):
{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% block content %}
<h2>Search</h2>
<form method="get" action=".">
<table>
{{ form.as_table }}
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>
<input type="submit" value="Search">
</td>
</tr>
</table>
{% if query %}
<h3>Results</h3>
{% for result in page.object_list %}
<p>
<a href="{{ result.object.get_absolute_url }}">{{ result.object.title }}</a>
</p>
{% empty %}
<p>No results found.</p>
{% endfor %}
{% if page.has_previous or page.has_next %}
<div>
{% if page.has_previous %}<a href="?q={{ query }}&page={{ page.previous_page_number }}">{% endif %}« Previous{% if page.has_previous %}</a>{% endif %}
|
{% if page.has_next %}<a href="?q={{ query }}&page={{ page.next_page_number }}">{% endif %}Next »{% if page.has_next %}</a>{% endif %}
</div>
{% endif %}
{% else %}
{# Show some example queries to run, maybe query syntax, something else? #}
{% endif %}
</form>
{% endblock %}
Note that the page.object_list
is actually a list of SearchResult
objects instead of individual models. These objects have all the data returned
from that record within the search index as well as score. They can also
directly access the model for the result via {{ result.object }}
. So the
{{ result.object.title }}
uses the actual Note
object in the database
and accesses its title
field.
Reindex¶
The final step, now that you have everything setup, is to put your data in from your database into the search index. Haystack ships with a management command to make this process easy.
Note
If you’re using the Solr backend, you have an extra step. Solr’s
configuration is XML-based, so you’ll need to manually regenerate the
schema. You should run
./manage.py build_solr_schema
first, drop the XML output in your
Solr’s schema.xml
file and restart your Solr server.
Simply run ./manage.py rebuild_index
. You’ll get some totals of how many
models were processed and placed in the index.
Note
Using the standard SearchIndex
, your search index content is only
updated whenever you run either ./manage.py update_index
or start
afresh with ./manage.py rebuild_index
.
You should cron up a ./manage.py update_index
job at whatever interval
works best for your site (using --age=<num_hours>
reduces the number of
things to update).
Alternatively, if you have low traffic and/or your search engine can handle
it, the RealtimeSignalProcessor
automatically handles updates/deletes
for you.
Complete!¶
You can now visit the search section of your site, enter a search query and receive search results back for the query! Congratulations!
What’s Next?¶
This tutorial just scratches the surface of what Haystack provides. The
SearchQuerySet
is the underpinning of all search in Haystack and provides
a powerful, QuerySet
-like API (see SearchQuerySet API). You can
use much more complicated SearchForms
/SearchViews
to give users a better
UI (see Views & Forms). And the Best Practices provides
insight into non-obvious or advanced usages of Haystack.