Whoosh 3.49.0 documentation

Whoosh is a fast, pure-Python full-text indexing, search, and spell-checking library. It adds ranked search — a query language, faceting, highlighting, and “did you mean?” spelling correction — to any Python program, with no compiler, no server, and no native dependencies. If you can open a file, you can build an index.

Try it live in your browser — no install needed — at the interactive demo. It runs the real library compiled to WebAssembly (via Pyodide) and answers your queries with BM25 ranking and highlighting, entirely client-side.

New here? Start with the Quick start.

Project status (2026): actively maintained again

This fork continues Whoosh — originally created by Matt Chaput — after two rounds of abandonment, now running on Python 3.10–3.14. Install it as pip install whoosh3. You can report bugs and request features on the issue tracker and ask questions in Discussions. If Whoosh is useful to you, a ⭐ on GitHub helps other people find a search library that’s alive again.

Contents

Indices and tables