wagtail-pg-search-backend

A PostgreSQL full text search backend for Wagtail CMS.

Installation

PostgreSQL full text search in Wagtail requires PostgreSQL >= 9.2 (noticable speed improvements are in place for PostgreSQL >= 9.5), Django >= 1.10 and Wagtail >= 1.8.

First, install the module using:

pip install wagtail-pg-search-backend

Then you’ll need to do a little bit of configuration.

Add the following to the project settings:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'wagtail_pgsearchbackend'
    ...
]

WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'wagtail_pgsearchbackend.backend',
        'SEARCH_CONFIG': 'english'
    }
}

Then run migrations to add the required database table:

./manage.py migrate wagtail_pgsearchbackend

Configuration

The SEARCH_CONFIG key takes a text search configuration name. This controls the stemming, stopwords etc. used when searching and indexing the database. To get a list of the available config names use this query:

SELECT cfgname FROM pg_catalog.pg_ts_config

Usage

This backend implements the required methods to be compatible with most features mentioned in the the Wagtail search docs.

Known limitations

SearchField.partial_match behaviour is not implemented.
Due to a PostgreSQL limitation, SearchField.boost is only partially respected. It is changed so that there can only be 4 different boosts. If you define 4 or less different boosts, everything will be perfectly accurate. However, your search will be a little less accurate if you define more than 4 different boosts. That being said, it will work and be roughly the same.
SearchField.es_extra is not handled because it is specific to ElasticSearch.
Using SearchQuerySet.search while limiting to specific field(s) is only supported for database fields, not methods.

Performance

The PostgreSQL search backend has been tried and tested on a few small to medium sized website and its performance compares favorably to that of ElasticSearch.

Some noticeable speed improvements are in place when using PostgreSQL >= 9.5.

Features to add

These features would awesome to have once this project is merged with Wagtail:

Per-object boosting
Faceting
Autocomplete (maybe it should replace partial search?)
Spelling suggestions

Development

Install the package and dev requirements:

pip install -e . -r requirements-dev.txt

Creating migrations

First create a database:

createdb -Upostgres wagtail_pgsearchbackend

Then call makemigrations using the test settings:

django-admin makemigrations --settings=tests.settings

Testing

To run the unittests for the current environment’s Python version and Wagtail run:

make unittests

To check the code for style errors run:

make flaketest

To combine these tasks run:

make

To run the unittest against all supported versions of Python and Wagtail run:

tox

The tox run will also create a coverage report combining the results of all runs. This report is located in htmlcov/index.html.

To run individual tests by name use the runtests.py script and give the dotted path the the test module(s), class(es) or method(s) that you want to test e.g.:

./runtests.py tests.test_module.TestClass.test_method

Release files for wagtail-pg-search-backend 1.3.2

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for wagtail-pg-search-backend 1.3.2
File	Size	Uploaded
wagtail-pg-search-backend-1.3.2.tar.gz	17.5 kB	Apr 29, 2017	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for wagtail-pg-search-backend 1.3.2
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
wagtail_pg_search_backend-1.3.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl 14.8 kB Apr 29, 2017	Python 2, Python 3	none	any	Details

Total release size: 32.3 kB

Release files / wagtail-pg-search-backend-1.3.2.tar.gz

Download URL	wagtail-pg-search-backend-1.3.2.tar.gz
Size	17.5 kB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`afcd888c51b6c282ae13691e305cded93dbfbcd3c5bccc474eb6f4dbe4f188e6`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`855b76e80ecd6d1d3eec2b12d2ca90682a1d6cfec0c5e2d70a21043f7fd2bfc6`
Upload date	Apr 29, 2017
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No

Release files / wagtail_pg_search_backend-1.3.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	wagtail_pg_search_backend-1.3.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Size	14.8 kB
Tags	Python 2 Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`ea35c908df83ffb581ac088b355d3e2977515a2d1ab50e98a01390d01fa2d573`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`207e1e67eec6a0acd83cbcf88eb91cf03ded2c8fd271f2b53100696b2939b1da`
Upload date	Apr 29, 2017
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No