Overview

xapian-haystack is a backend for use with the Django Haystack search API and the Xapian search engine.

• More information on Haystack can be found here: haystackserach.org.
• More information on Xapian can be found here: xapian.org.

Requirements

• Python 2.4 (May work with 2.3, but untested)
• Django 1.0.x
• Django-Haystack 1.0
• Xapian 1.0.13+ (May work with earlier versions, but untested)
• mod_wsgi 1.3.X

Notes

• Due to an issue with mod_python possibly causing deadlocks with Xapian (issue #364), when Python is not invoked through the "main interpreter", mod_python is not supported with xapian-haystack. It may work, with some tweaking, but your mileage will vary.
• Because Xapian does not support simultaneous WritableDatabase connections, it is strongly recommended that users take care when using RealTimeSearchIndex to either set WSGIDaemonProcess processes=1 or use some other way of ensuring that there are not multiple attempts to write to the indexes. Alternatively, use SearchIndex and a cronjob to reindex content at set time intervals (sample cronjob can be found here <http://gist.github.com/216247>_) or derive your own SearchIndex to implement some other form of keeping your indexes up to date.

Installation

1. Copy or symlink xapian_backend.py into haystack/backends/ or install it by running one of the following commands:

   python setup.py install

   or

   pip install xapian-haystack

   or

   easy_install xapian-haystack

2. Add HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_PATH to settings.py

3. Set HAYSTACK_SEARCH_ENGINE to xapian

Testing

The easiest way to test xapian-haystack is to symlink or copy the xapian_haystack/tests folder into the haystack/tests folder so that your source tree resembles this layout:

django-haystack
    +---haystack
    |       |
    |       +---backends
    |              |
    |              +---solr_backend.py
    |              +---whoosh_backend.py
    |              +---xapian_backend.py
    +---tests
            |
            +---core
            +---solr_tests
            +---whoosh_tests
            +---xapian_tests

Once this is done, the tests can be executed in a similar fashion as the rest of the Haystack test-suite:

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

Source

The latest source code can always be found here: github.com/notanumber/xapian-haystack

Credits

xapian-haystack is maintained by David Sauve, and is funded by Trapeze.

License

xapian-haystack is Copyright (c) 2009-2010 David Sauve, Trapeze. It is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.

Questions, Comments, Concerns:

Feel free to open an issue here: github.com/notanumber/xapian-haystack/issues Alternatively, ask questions on the django-haystack mailing list or irc channel.