Django Haystack and Elasticsearch- part one

Hello! Today blog post is about Django Haystack and how to integrate it quickly with Elasticsearch.

First after creating django project (At beginning of 2016 django-haystack don't work properly with django 1.9 so I used 1.8.9 version) and making new app let's add models:

from django.db import models
GENDER_CHOICES = (
    ('Male', 'Male'),
    ('Female', 'Female')
)
class Person(models.Model):
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    gender = models.CharField(max_length=10, choices=GENDER_CHOICES)
    email = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    ip_address = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    def __str__(self):
        return '{first_name} {last_name}'.format(first_name=self.first_name, last_name=self.last_name)

And register model to the admin site. Don't forget about adding created app to settings.py and making manage.py makemigrations and manage.py migrate after it:

from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Person
admin.site.register(Person)

Then create simple script wich will load a data from JSON to the database. This JSON data is randomly generated data from this webpage. Call it load.py and place in your django application folder.

# coding=utf-8
import os
import json
from .models import Person
DATA_FILE = os.path.join(
os.path.dirname(
    os.path.dirname(
    os.path.dirname(__file__))),
    'MOCK_DATA.json'
)
def run(verbose=True):
with open(DATA_FILE) as data_file:
    data = json.load(data_file)
    for record in data:
        Person.objects.create(
            first_name=record['first_name'],
            last_name=record['last_name'],
            gender=record['gender'],
            email=record['email'],
            ip_address=record['ip_address'])
        print(record)

This script looks for file MOCK_DATA.json. Then based on fields on this JSON loads data to the django application. You can run this by manage.py shell and then:

>>> from django_app import load
>>> load.run()
{'ip_address': '86.24.99.139', 'gender': 'Female', 'first_name': 'Christine', 'last_name': 'Cunningham', 'email': '[email protected]'}
{'ip_address': '250.20.255.181', 'gender': 'Male', 'first_name': 'Scott', 'last_name': 'Hanson', 'email': '[email protected]'}
# rest of the records

That's all for this week. In next post, I will concentrate on how to setup Elasticsearch and django-haystack.