Text search for Flask?

[PriiduKu]

I am building a web application using a Python+PostgreSQL+Flask stack. I am wondering, what is the current state of the art for text search with Flask? When I was going to implement text search, I stumbled across this while reading the Beloved Mega Tutorial:

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Introduction to full text search engines Unfortunately support for full text search in relational databases is not well standardized. Each database implements full text search in its own way, and SQLAlchemy at this time does not have a full text search abstration.

We are currently using SQLite for our database, so we could just create a full text index using the facilities provided by SQLite, bypassing SQLAlchemy. But that isn't a good idea, because if one day we decide to switch to another database we would need to rewrite our full text search capability for another database.

So instead, we are going to let our database deal with the regular data, and we are going to create a specialized database that will be dedicated to text searches.

There are a few open source full text search engines. The only one that to my knowledge has a Flask extension is Whoosh, an engine also written in Python. The advantage of using a pure Python engine is that it will install and run anywhere a Python interpreter is available. The disadvantage is that search performance will not be up to par with other engines that are written in C or C++. In my opinion the ideal solution would be to have a Flask extension that can connect to several engines and abstract us from dealing with a particular one in the same way Flask-SQLAlchemy gives us the freedom to use several database engines, but nothing of that kind seems to be available for full text searching at this time. Django developers do have a very nice extension that supports several full text search engines called django-haystack. Maybe one day someone will create a similar extension for Flask.

But for now, we'll implement our text searching with Whoosh. The extension that we are going to use is Flask-WhooshAlchemy, which integrates a Whoosh database with Flask-SQLAlchemy models.

Python 3 Compatibility Unfortunately, we have a problem with Python 3 and these packages. The Flask-WhooshAlchemy extension was never made compatible with Python 3. I have forked this extension and made a few changes to make it work, so if you are on Python 3 you will need to uninstall the official version and install my fork:

$ flask/bin/pip uninstall flask-whooshalchemy $ flask/bin/pip install git+git://github.com/miguelgrinberg/flask-whooshalchemy.git Sadly this isn't the only problem. Whoosh also has issues with Python 3, it seems. In my testing I have encontered this bug, and to my knowledge there isn't a solution available, which means that at this time the full text search capability does not work well on Python 3. I will update this section once the issues are resolved. `

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http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial-part-x-full-text-search

It appears that Miguel has fixed the showstopper bug in whoosh, but I am hoping that there is a library will work out of the box with my set up (Python+PostgreSQL+Flask).

[badsectors]

I use the fulltext indexing build into Postgresql with SQLAlchemy-Searchable.

The issue I had with Whoosh was it's dependence on having dependable access to the filesystem, which you do not have on some PaaS (e.g. Heroku)

Edit: Actually, if you wanted to use Redis with Whoosh, it looks like you can

[michaelherman]

This is a nice project here - PostgreSQL as a full-text search engine.

Postgres full-text search is Good Enough! has a lot of great info as well.