PostgreSQL full-text search in the Django Admin#

Django 3.1 introduces PostgreSQL search_type="websearch" - which gives you search with advanced operators like "phrase search" -excluding. James Turk wrote about this here, and it’s also in my weeknotes.

I decided to add it to my Django Admin interface. It was really easy using the get_search_results() model admin method, documented here.

My models already have a search_document full-text search column, as described in Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL. So all I needed to add to my ModelAdmin subclasses was this:

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    def get_search_results(self, request, queryset, search_term):
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        if not search_term:
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            return super().get_search_results(
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                request, queryset, search_term
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            )
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        query = SearchQuery(search_term, search_type="websearch")
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        rank = SearchRank(F("search_document"), query)
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        queryset = (
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            queryset
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            .annotate(rank=rank)
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            .filter(search_document=query)
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            .order_by("-rank")
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        )
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        return queryset, False

Here’s the full implementation for my personal blog.