Core
Whoosh-NG builds on the battle-tested foundations of the original Whoosh library. This section documents the classic full-text search features that have powered Whoosh for over a decade — the engine, schema, analyzers, scoring, and all the concepts you need to build a reliable search experience.
These features are stable, backwards-compatible with Whoosh 1.x/2.x, and live in the
whooshpackage. New, optional extensions (vector search, plugins, middleware, storage providers) are documented under Modern.
What you'll find here
| Guide | Description |
|---|---|
| Quickstart | Index your first documents in five minutes |
| Installation | Install Whoosh-NG and its optional extras |
| Introduction to Whoosh | What Whoosh is and what it can do for you |
| Core Concepts | Index, Schema, Writer, Searcher, and data flow |
| About Analyzers | Tokenizers, filters, and the analysis pipeline |
| Schema Design | Field types and how to model your documents |
| Indexing | Add, update, and delete documents |
| Searching | Run queries, work with results, sort and filter |
| Query Language | The Whoosh query syntax and QueryParser |
| Stemming & Stop Words | Reduce words to roots and filter noise |
| N-grams | Substring, prefix, and autocomplete matching |
| Dates & Numeric Ranges | Range queries and faceting on numbers/dates |
| Sorting | Facets and sort keys for ordering results |
| Highlighting | Build highlighted result excerpts |
| Did you mean... | Correct typos in user queries |
| Query Expansion & Keywords | Key-term extraction and "more like this" |
| Nested Documents | Parent-child document hierarchies |
| Concurrency & Locking | Threads, write locks, and index versioning |
| Batch Indexing | Tips for speeding up large batch indexes |
| Field Caches | Caching behavior for sorting and faceting |
| Whoosh Recipes | Handy code snippets for common tasks |
Classic analysis pipeline
Whoosh turns raw text into searchable tokens through a composable pipeline:
Text → Tokenizer → Filters (lowercase, stop words, stemming) → Indexed terms
The Stemming & Stop Words and N-grams guides show how to customize this pipeline for your language and use case.
Reference
- Glossary — Key terms used throughout the documentation
- Migration Guide — Upgrading from Whoosh or Whoosh-Reloaded
- Legacy Cleanup Strategy — How the modern typed surface is evolving
Next steps
Ready for the new stuff? Head over to Modern to discover vector search, the plugin system, middleware pipelines, and pluggable storage.