Use this package to allow full-text search in your Django Project.

You need Django (>= 1.0) and Xapian (>= 1.0.2), and also Xapian-bindings with Python enabled.

Notice: there is an old issue with Xapian in mod_python environment. So be careful.

Notice: new versions of Djapian - 2.x. It is backward-incompatible with older 1.x releases. See release notes for more details. It is highly recommended to rebuild your indexes after update of the code.

Notice: with last 2.2.2 release has been introduced database schema backward-incompatible bug fix - Change model has switched its object_id field type from integer to string.

Usage example

Assume that we have this models in our imaginary application:

class Person(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=150)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

class Entry(models.Model):
    author = models.ForeignKey(Person, related_name="entries")
    title = models.CharField(max_length=250)
    created_on = models.DateTimeField(default=datetime.now)

    is_active = models.BooleanField(default=True)

    text = models.TextField()

    editors = models.ManyToManyField(Person, related_name="edited_entries")

    def headline(self):
        return "%s - %s" % (self.author, self.title)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title

And we want to apply indexing functionality for model Entry. The next step is to create Indexer instance with proper settings. Indexer may look like this:

import djapian

class EntryIndexer(djapian.Indexer):
    fields=["text"]
    tags=[
        ("author",  "author.name" ),
        ("title",   "title",     3),
        ("date",    "created_on"  ),
        ("active",  "is_active"   ),
        ("editors", "editors"     )
    ]
    trigger=lambda indexer, obj: obj.is_active

djapian.space.add_index(Entry, EntryIndexer, attach_as="indexer")

In the django shell create some instances of models:

>>> p = Person.objects.create(name="Alex")
>>> Entry.objects.create(author=p, title="Test entry", text="Not large text field")
>>> Entry.objects.create(author=p, title="Another test entry", is_active=False)
>>> Entry.objects.create(author=p, title="Third small entry", text="Some another text")

>>> Entry.indexer.update()

Thats all! Each Entry instance has been indexed and now ready for search. Let's try:

>>> result = Entry.indexer.search('title:entry')
>>> len(result), result.count()
2, 2
>>> for row in result:
...   row.percent, row.instance.headline()
... 
99 Alex - Test entry
98 Alex - Third small entry

You can follow complete Tutorial for study Djapian basics.