Tantivy is a full text search engine library written in Rust.

It is closer to Apache Lucene than to Elasticsearch or Apache Solr in the sense it is not an off-the-shelf search engine server, but rather a crate that can be used to build such a search engine.

Tantivy is, in fact, strongly inspired by Lucene's design.

Benchmark

The following benchmark break downs performance for different type of queries / collection.

Your mileage WILL vary depending on the nature of queries and their load.

Features

• Full-text search
• Configurable tokenizer (stemming available for 17 Latin languages with third party support for Chinese (tantivy-jieba and cang-jie), Japanese (lindera and tantivy-tokenizer-tiny-segmenter) and Korean (lindera + lindera-ko-dic-builder)
• Fast (check out the 🐎 ✨ benchmark ✨ 🐎)
• Tiny startup time (<10ms), perfect for command line tools
• BM25 scoring (the same as Lucene)
• Natural query language (e.g. (michael AND jackson) OR "king of pop")
• Phrase queries search (e.g. "michael jackson")
• Incremental indexing
• Multithreaded indexing (indexing English Wikipedia takes < 3 minutes on my desktop)
• Mmap directory
• SIMD integer compression when the platform/CPU includes the SSE2 instruction set
• Single valued and multivalued u64, i64, and f64 fast fields (equivalent of doc values in Lucene)
• &[u8] fast fields
• Text, i64, u64, f64, dates, and hierarchical facet fields
• LZ4 compressed document store
• Range queries
• Faceted search
• Configurable indexing (optional term frequency and position indexing)
• Cheesy logo with a horse

Non-features

• Distributed search is out of the scope of Tantivy. That being said, Tantivy is a library upon which one could build a distributed search. Serializable/mergeable collector state for instance, are within the scope of Tantivy.

Getting started

Tantivy works on stable Rust (>= 1.27) and supports Linux, MacOS, and Windows.

• Tantivy's simple search example
• tantivy-cli and its tutorial - tantivy-cli is an actual command line interface that makes it easy for you to create a search engine, index documents, and search via the CLI or a small server with a REST API. It walks you through getting a wikipedia search engine up and running in a few minutes.
• Reference doc for the last released version

How can I support this project?

There are many ways to support this project.

• Use Tantivy and tell us about your experience on Discord or by email ([email protected])
• Report bugs
• Write a blog post
• Help with documentation by asking questions or submitting PRs
• Contribute code (you can join our Discord server)
• Talk about Tantivy around you

Contributing code

We use the GitHub Pull Request workflow: reference a GitHub ticket and/or include a comprehensive commit message when opening a PR.

Clone and build locally

Tantivy compiles on stable Rust but requires Rust >= 1.27. To check out and run tests, you can simply run:

    git clone https://github.com/quickwit-inc/tantivy.git
    cd tantivy
    cargo build

Run tests

Some tests will not run with just cargo test because of fail-rs. To run the tests exhaustively, run ./run-tests.sh.

Debug

You might find it useful to step through the programme with a debugger.

A failing test

Make sure you haven't run cargo clean after the most recent cargo test or cargo build to guarantee that the target/ directory exists. Use this bash script to find the name of the most recent debug build of Tantivy and run it under rust-gdb:

find target/debug/ -maxdepth 1 -executable -type f -name "tantivy*" -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n' | sort -r | cut -d " " -f 3 | xargs -I RECENT_DBG_TANTIVY rust-gdb RECENT_DBG_TANTIVY

Now that you are in rust-gdb, you can set breakpoints on lines and methods that match your source code and run the debug executable with flags that you normally pass to cargo test like this:

$gdb run --test-threads 1 --test $NAME_OF_TEST

An example

By default, rustc compiles everything in the examples/ directory in debug mode. This makes it easy for you to make examples to reproduce bugs:

rust-gdb target/debug/examples/$EXAMPLE_NAME
$ gdb run