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:

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 and INDEX in the Elasticsearch entry in WAGTAILSEARCH_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.