Whoosh is a search engine written entirely in Python. It's slightly easier to install and run than the Sphinx search engine and some would argue it generally feels "more pythonic". To install Whoosh you can simply easy_install Whoosh
or visit http://whoosh.ca to get the latest development version.
The fact that Whoosh is pure Python is very convenient for developers who are not interested in or lack knowledge of Java or compiling UNIX software. It can get you up and running quickly and it supports integration with Django, as we'll see shortly.
Just like in Sphinx, Whoosh needs to define and build a set of indexes on our data. The Whoosh documentation is very extensive (another advantage of a pure Python tool) and explains all the indexing options in great detail. We will present a quick tutorial here, before continuing on to using Whoosh with Django.
In Sphinx we defined our indexes using the index section of our sphinx.conf
. In Whoosh, they use a Schema
object, which...