Is there a pure Python Lucene?

Whoosh is a new project which is similar to lucene, but is pure python.

The only one pure-python (not involving even C extension) search solution I know of is Nucular. It's slow (much slower than PyLucene) and unstable yet.

We moved from PyLucene-based home baked search and indexing to Solr but YMMV.

I recently found pyndexter. It provides abstract interface to various different backend full-text search engines/indexers. And it ships with a default pure-python implementation.

These things can be disastrously slow though in Python.

For some applications pure Python is overrated. Take a look at Xapian.

lupy was a lucene port to pure python.The lupy people suggest that you use PyLucene. Sorry. Maybe you can use the Java sources in combination with Jython.

+1 to the Xapian and Pyndexter answers.

Ferret is actually written in C with Ruby bindings on top. A pure Ruby search engine would be even slower than a pure Python one. I would love to see "someone else" write a Cython/Pyrex layer for Python interface to Ferret, but won't do it myself because why bother when there are Python bindings for Xapian.

After weeks of searching for this, I found a nice Python solution: repoze.catalog. It's not strictly Python-only because it uses ZODB for storage, but it seems a better dependency to me than something like SOLR.