Take the 2-minute tour ×

I have a problem with django-haystack. According to this tutorial I got this apps: django-haystack xapian-haystack

I set everything but i have this error: django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: 'xapian' isn't an available search backend. Available options are: 'dummy', 'solr', 'whoosh'

Why xapian is not available? Thanks for your help.

share|improve this question
ok, i found a solution:) here github.com/notanumber/xapian-haystack –  pmoniq Jan 30 '10 at 1:02

3 Answers 3

up vote 6 down vote accepted

Xapian isn't included with Haystack due to licensing differences. You have to get the xapian backend from http://github.com/notanumber/xapian-haystack.

share|improve this answer

To install xapian, you may need xapian and xapian-bindings. So now, you just have to install xapian-haystack with :

pip install xapian-haystack


easy_install xapian-haystack
share|improve this answer

i don't think that xapian is included with any of these python libraries. they only allow you to leverage xapian from python code. you need to install xapian itself first.

see more here: http://xapian.org/

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


