Django, Haystack and Elasticsearch – Part 1

I’m wrapping up a little side project at the moment (more on that very soon) which required full-text search, autocomplete, and a few other bits of search related functionality.

After some research I landed upon the combination of Elasticsearch and the awesome Django application Haystack.

First step was to get Elasticsearch up and running locally on OS X…

1) Download latest zip from http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/elkdownloads/. A good spot is:

/opt/elasticsearch-1.1.x

2) Create the following directories:

/opt/elasticsearch-1.1.x/data
/opt/elasticsearch-1.1.x/work
/opt/elasticsearch-1.1.x/logs

3) Add the following to your .profile (allows you to run Elasticsearch from the command prompt without the full path):

4) Update the following values in the Elasticsearch config file:

5) Ensure all requirements are installed (django-haystack, pyelasticsearch, requests, simplejson):

6) You should now be able to start Elasticsearch:

7) Add Haystack to your Django config:

8) After you’ve added your search indexes, you can use manage.py to rebuild the search index:

$ python manage.py rebuild_index