Search and django CMS

See also

• Version States

• djangocms-versioning

• django-haystack

If you already have a background in django CMS and are coming from the 3.x days, you may be familiar with the package aldryn-search which was the recommended way for setting up search inside your django CMS project. However, with the deprecation of it and the new versioning primitives in django CMS 4.x being incompatible with it, you may wonder where to go from here.

To keep it simple, you can install an external package that handles implementing the search index for you. There are multiple options, such as

• djangocms-aldryn-search

• djangocms-haystack

• … and others

The idea is that we implement the search index just as we would for normal Django models, e.g. use an external library to handle the indexing (django-haystack in the above examples) and just implement the logic that builds the querysets and filters the languages depending on what index is currently active. django-haystack exposes many helpful utilities for interacting with the indexes and return the appropriate results for indexing.

To get an idea on how this works, feel free to look at the code of the above projects. A very simple index could look something like this:

from cms.models import PageContent
from django.db import models
from haystack import indexes


class PageContentIndex(indexes.SearchIndex, indexes.Indexable):
    text = indexes.CharField(document=True, use_template=False)
    title = indexes.CharField(indexed=False, stored=True)
    url = indexes.CharField(indexed=False, stored=True)

    def get_model(self):
        return PageContent

    def index_queryset(self, using=None) -> models.QuerySet:
        return self.get_model().objects.filter(language=using)

    def prepare(self, instance: PageContent) -> dict:
      self.prepared_data = super().prepare(instance)
      self.prepared_data["url"] = instance.page.get_absolute_url()
      self.prepared_data["title"] = instance.title
      self.prepared_data["text"] = (
        self.prepared_data["title"] + (instance.meta_description or "")
      )
      return self.prepared_data

Hint

Your index should be placed inside a search_indexes.py in one of your INSTALLED_APPS!

The above snippet uses the standard text field that is recommended by django-haystack to store all the indexable content. There is also a separate field for the title because you may want to display it as a heading in your search result, and a field for the URL so you can link to the pages.

The indexed content here is not using a template (which is one of the options to compose fields into an indexable field) but rather concatenates it manually using the prepare method which gets called by django-haystack to prepare data before the indexing starts.

As you can see in the index_queryset method, we only return those PageContent instances that are published and have a language matching the currently used Haystack connection key.

The PageContent then get passed into the prepare method one by one, so we can use the instance.page attribute to get the page meta description and use it as indexable text as well as the title of the current PageContent version.

Finally, you need to set your HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS to contain a default key as well as any language that you want to be indexed as additional keys. You could also use different backends for your languages as well, this is up to you and how you want to configure your haystack installation. An example could look somewhat like this:

...

HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
  'default': {
        "ENGINE": "haystack.backends.whoosh_backend.WhooshEngine",
        "PATH": os.path.join(ROOT_DIR, "search_index", "whoosh_index_default"),
  },
  "en": {
      "ENGINE": "haystack.backends.whoosh_backend.WhooshEngine",
      "PATH": os.path.join(ROOT_DIR, "search_index", "whoosh_index_en"),
  },
  "de": {
      "ENGINE": "haystack.backends.whoosh_backend.WhooshEngine",
      "PATH": os.path.join(ROOT_DIR, "search_index", "whoosh_index_de"),
  }
}

...

Hint

This should be configured in your projects settings.py!

Now run python manage.py rebuild_index to start building your index. Depending on what backend you chose you should now see your index at the configured location.

You can inspect your index using a SearchQuerySet:

from haystack.query import SearchQuerySet

qs = SearchQuerySet(using="<your haystack connection alias / language key>")
for result in qs.all():
  print(result.text)

Now it’s up to you to add custom indexes to your own models, build views for your SearchQuerySet to implement a search form and much more.