Basic usage

This tutorial will guide you through the basic usage of the django_meilisearch library. You will learn how to install the library, configure Meilisearch in your Django project, create a Meilisearch index from a Django model, synchronize data, and perform a basic search.

Installation and configuration

Install the library in your Django project using your preferred package manager. For example, using pip:

pip install django_meilisearch

Add library to INSTALLED_APPS

To use the library, it's necessary to add it to the INSTALLED_APPS list in your Django project's settings.py file.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'django_meilisearch',
]

Configure Meilisearch in settings.py

Add the following configuration to your Django project's settings.py file to connect to your Meilisearch server:

DJANGO_MEILISEARCH = {
    "url": "http://localhost:7700",  # Your MeiliSearch host
    "api_key": "meilisearch_master_key",  # Your MeiliSearch master key
    "timeout": 1,  # Timeout for MeiliSearch requests in seconds (optional)
}

Create a Meilisearch index from a Django model

To create a Meilisearch index from a Django model, you need to define a index class that inherits from BaseIndex and specify the model to index.

from django_meilisearch.index import BaseIndex

from myapp.models import MyModel


class MyIndex(BaseIndex):
    name = "my_index"  # Name of the Meilisearch index
    model = MyModel  # Django model to index

How to synchronize data

To synchronize data between your Django model and the Meilisearch index, the library provides management commands to synchronize data between your Django model and the Meilisearch index. They have the following common syntax:

python manage.py meilisearch {action} {index_name} 

The index_name parameter is the name of the Meilisearch index to synchronize. If you don't specify an index name, the library will try to apply the action synchronize all indexes.

The action parameter can be one of the following:

Action	Description
create	Create the Meilisearch index, if it doesn't exist. Otherwise, it will do nothing.
populate	Populate an existing Meilisearch index with data from the Django model. If the index doesn't exist, it will return an error.
rebuild	Destroy the Meilisearch index, recreate it, and populate it with data from the Django model.
destroy	Clean and destroy the Meilisearch index.

The actions listed above are synchronous, meaning that they will block the execution of the command until the operation is completed. If you have a large dataset, consider using the asynchronous versions of these commands, which are preffixed with a. For example, apopulate will populate the index asynchronously.

Note

The asynchronous versions of the commands will return a task ID (or a list of task IDs if you are populating a large dataset) that you can use to check the status of the operation.

Basic search example

To perform a basic search using the Meilisearch index, you can use the search method provided by the index class. The search method accepts a query string and returns a list of search results.

from myapp.indexes import MyIndex


class MyView(View):
    def get(self, request):
        query = request.GET.get("q", "")
        results = MyIndex.search(query)
        return JsonResponse({"results": results})