This is a simple Django database backend that allows interaction with Sphinx via SphinxQL. It is basically the default Django MySQL backend with some changes for Sphinx.

SphinxQL is a MySQL clone mode that Sphinx searchd supports. It allows you to query indexes via regular old SQL syntax. If you are using rt (real-time) indexes, you can also add and update documents in the index.

This backend is meant to be configued as a database in the Django settings.py.

This package provides a Manager class, SQLCompiler suite and supporting code to make this possible.

First of all, you must define a database connection in the Django configuration. You must also install the Sphinx database router and add django_sphinx_db to your INSTALLED_APPS list.

# Install django_sphinx_db:
INSTALLED_APPS += ('django_sphinx_db', )

# This is the name of the sphinx server in DATABASES:
SPHINX_DATABASE_NAME = 'sphinx'

# Define the connection to Sphinx
DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        # Your default database connection goes here...
    },
    SPHINX_DATABASE_NAME:  {
        'ENGINE': 'django_sphinx_db.backend.sphinx',
        # The database name does not matter.
        'NAME': '',
        # There is no user name or password.
        'USER': '',
        'PASSWORD': '',
        # Don't use localhost, this will result in using a UDS instead of TCP...
        'HOST': '127.0.0.1',
        'PORT': '9306',
    },
}

# ... and route accordingly ...
DATABASE_ROUTERS = (
    'django_sphinx_db.routers.SphinxRouter',
)    ```

Then define a model that derives from the SphinxModel. As usual, the model will be placed in models.py.

from django_sphinx_db.backend.models import SphinxModel, SphinxField

class MyIndex(SphinxModel):
    class Meta:
        # This next bit is important, you don't want Django to manage
        # the table for this model.
        managed = False

    name = SphinxField()
    content = SphinxField()
    date = models.DateTimeField()
    size = models.IntegerField()

Now you need to generate a configuration file for your index. A management command is provided to convert the model definition to a suitable configuration.

$ python manage.py syncsphinx >> /etc/sphinx.conf
$ vi /etc/sphinx.conf

The generated config file should be a good start however, you are urged to review the configuration against the [Sphinx configuration reference](http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/2.0.2/confgroup-index.html).

You can now query and manage your real-time index using the Django ORM. You can insert and update documents in the index using the following methods. The example below uses the [fulltext library](https://github.com/btimby/fulltext) for reading file contents as plain text.

import os, time, fulltext

# Add a document to the index.
path = 'resume.doc'
st = os.stat(path)
MyIndex.objects.create(
    name = path,
    content = fulltext.get(path, ''),
    size = st.st_size,
    date = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', time.localtime(st.st_mtime)),
)

# Update a document in the index
doc = MyIndex.objects.get(pk=1)
doc.content = fulltext.get(path, '')
doc.size = st.st_size
doc.date = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', time.localtime(st.st_mtime))
doc.save()

You can perform full-text queries using the Django search operator. Read the Django documentation for more information.

MyIndex.objects.filter(content__search='Foobar')

The query is passed through directly to Sphinx, so the Sphinx extended query syntax is respected.

The Sphinx backend for Django will ignore create_test_db and destroy_test_db calls. These calls will fail when the Sphinx database is configured, preventing you from running tests. However, this means that any configured Sphinx database will be used during testing. As long as you write your tests with this in mind, there should be no problem. Remember that you can use the TEST_NAME database connection parameter to redirect queries to a different database connection during test runs.