django-tsearch2

Postgresql's full text search support for Django

Installation

You'll need to install the unaccent extension and issue:

-- CREATE EXTENSION unaccent;

If you're running Postgresql 8, or don't have the unaccent extension installed, you can use this plpython function:

CREATE LANGUAGE plpythonu;

CREATE FUNCTION unaccent (string text)
  RETURNS varchar
AS $$

from unicodedata import normalize, category

return unicode(
    filter(
        lambda c: category(c) != 'Mn',
        normalize('NFKD', string.decode('utf-8'))
    )
).encode('utf-8')

$$ LANGUAGE plpythonu

Usage

You just need to inherit from the included SearchableModel class and add a custom manager to your model classes:

from django.db import models
from tsearch2.models import SearchableModel, SearchManager


class Book(SearchableModel):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    author = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    preface = models.TextField(blank=True)

    objects = SearchManager({
        'title': 'A',
        'author': 'A',
        'preface': 'D',
    })

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title

In this example, we're indexing the title, author and preface fields. The second parameter defines the weight, from 'A' (highest) to 'D' (lowest).

Now your querysets will include a search() method:

>>> Book.objects.search("pattern")
[<Book: Pattern: (Math Counts)>, <Book: Design Patterns>]

GeoDjango usage

Just add the tsearch2.gis.SearchGeoManager manager to your model instead. All methods of this manager return a SearchGeoQuerySet instance that mixes both feature sets.

Full documentation for the tsearch2 module is available at: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/textsearch-features.html