Haystack tweaks for Django 1.7.7. I had to upgrade to Haystack 2.3.1 to get it to work with Django 1.7.7. I also had to update the Xapian backend. But I ran into problems. On my laptop anyway (Ubuntu 14.0.4), xapian gets mad when search terms are greater than 245 chars (or something) when indexing. So I created a custom field that would simply omit terms greater than 64 chars and used this field everywhere I previously used a CharField. Secondly, the custom search form was broken now. Something changed in the Xapian backend and exact searches stopped working. Fortunately the auto_query (which I was using originally and broke during an upgrade) started working again. So I cut the search form back over to doing an auto_query. I kept the form the same (3 fields) because I didn't want to change the form and I think it's better that way.

"""
This module provides a common way for the various apps to integrate with services
that are installed at this site.

"""
from django.conf import settings
import redis

# Redis connection and database settings

REDIS_HOST = getattr(settings, 'REDIS_HOST', 'localhost')
REDIS_PORT = getattr(settings, 'REDIS_PORT', 6379)
REDIS_DB = getattr(settings, 'REDIS_DB', 0)
REDIS_SOCKET = getattr(settings, 'REDIS_UNIX_SOCKET', None)


def get_redis_connection(host=REDIS_HOST, port=REDIS_PORT, db=REDIS_DB,
                         unix_socket_path=REDIS_SOCKET):
    """
    Create and return a Redis connection using the supplied parameters.

    """
    if unix_socket_path:
        return redis.StrictRedis(unix_socket_path=unix_socket_path, db=db)
    return redis.StrictRedis(host=host, port=port, db=db)