Backends¶
Wagtailsearch has support for multiple backends giving you the choice between using the database for search or an external service such as Elasticsearch.
You can configure which backend to use with the WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS
setting:
WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS = {
'default': {
'BACKEND': 'wagtail.wagtailsearch.backends.db.DBSearch',
}
}
AUTO_UPDATE
¶
New in version 1.0.
By default, Wagtail will automatically keep all indexes up to date. This could impact performance when editing content, especially if your index is hosted on an external service.
The AUTO_UPDATE
setting allows you to disable this on a per-index basis:
WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS = {
'default': {
'BACKEND': ...,
'AUTO_UPDATE': False,
}
}
If you have disabled auto update, you must run the update_index command on a regular basis to keep the index in sync with the database.
BACKEND
¶
Here’s a list of backends that Wagtail supports out of the box.
Database Backend (default)¶
wagtail.wagtailsearch.backends.db.DBSearch
The database backend is very basic and is intended only to be used in development and on small sites. It cannot order results by relevance making it not very useful when searching a large amount of pages.
It also doesn’t support:
- Searching on fields in subclasses of
Page
(unless the class is being searched directly)- Indexing callables and other attributes
- Converting accented characters to ASCII
If any of these features are important to you, we recommend using Elasticsearch instead.
Elasticsearch Backend¶
wagtail.wagtailsearch.backends.elasticsearch.ElasticSearch
Prerequisites are the Elasticsearch service itself and, via pip, the elasticsearch-py package:
pip install elasticsearch
The backend is configured in settings:
WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS = {
'default': {
'BACKEND': 'wagtail.wagtailsearch.backends.elasticsearch.ElasticSearch',
'URLS': ['http://localhost:9200'],
'INDEX': 'wagtail',
'TIMEOUT': 5,
}
}
Other than BACKEND
the keys are optional and default to the values shown. In addition, any other keys are passed directly to the Elasticsearch constructor as case-sensitive keyword arguments (e.g. 'max_retries': 1
).
If you prefer not to run an Elasticsearch server in development or production, there are many hosted services available, including Searchly, who offer a free account suitable for testing and development. To use Searchly:
- Sign up for an account at dashboard.searchly.com/users/sign_up
- Use your Searchly dashboard to create a new index, e.g. ‘wagtaildemo’
- Note the connection URL from your Searchly dashboard
- Configure
URLS
andINDEX
in the Elasticsearch entry inWAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS
- Run
./manage.py update_index
Rolling Your Own¶
Wagtail search backends implement the interface defined in wagtail/wagtail/wagtailsearch/backends/base.py
. At a minimum, the backend’s search()
method must return a collection of objects or model.objects.none()
. For a fully-featured search backend, examine the Elasticsearch backend code in elasticsearch.py
.