Among Lucene/Solr, Whoosh, Sphinx, Xapian which integrates best with python? [closed]

Question

I am a newb coder in a startup and I am implementing search of documents in a directory in a web host.

I am comparing Lucene/Solr, Whoosh, Sphinx and Xapian. Whoosh is natively python. But I want your opinions on it too. Which of these have

• mature and easy to use and install interfaces with python? (Whoosh is a no-brainer)
• no chance for crashes, bottlenecks and other failures
• best documented interface (Im not reading PHP docs because python docs were sparse)
• easiest to get up and running (only one has a quick-start tutorial)

Answer 1

Speaking for Apache Solr, Python has several Solr clients, which I've collected based on feedback from our customers at Websolr:

1. Haystack is very popular, and designed for seamless integration within Django apps. If you're developing a Django app, Haystack is for you.
2. Sunburnt looks to be more generic than Haystack, and is also very well documented. If you're doing plain ol' Python, Sunburnt is worth a look.

Other Python Solr clients that I've found, which seem a bit lower level...

• solrpy
• pysolr (I know, right?)
• Insol

Some more details about how your app is built (in particular, is it a Django app?) would help narrow things down from here. Good luck finding the best fit for your app!

Answer 2

Use Whoosh if you don't need the speed, extra features of the alternatives. It's great, has a nice API, good documentation. My second choice would probably be Xapian, which is fast and has a fairly decent API. They are all fairly mature products. If you don't know what you really need, I'd just go with Whoosh for now.

Answer 3

If you want quick python integration, try indextank. You can be up and running in 2 minutes, and it's free.

For the other alternatives, I'd go with Solr (provided you want to host the search servers yourself, or signup for websolr )

Disclaimer: I work at indextank.