I heard about SearXNG on a couple podcasts and saw it trending on GitHub several times before I finally decided to stand it up. I used it transparently when trying out khoj, a self-hosted AI LLM agent playground kind of a thing, but I’ve also been messing around with Open-WebUI to have a self-hosted ChatGPT-like experience. I don’t know if SearchXNG used to be harder to set up, but it was pretty simple with a Docker Compose up and a couple configuration options given my personal homelab setup. Using it feels very nice.
services:
redis:
container_name: redis
image: docker.io/valkey/valkey:8-alpine
command: valkey-server --save 30 1 --loglevel warning
restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
- ./data/redis:/data
logging:
driver: "json-file"
options:
max-size: "1m"
max-file: "1"
searxng:
container_name: searxng
image: docker.io/searxng/searxng:latest
restart: unless-stopped
ports:
- "8080:8080"
volumes:
- ./data/searxng:/etc/searxng:rw
env_file: .env
environment:
# - SEARXNG_BASE_URL=https://${SEARXNG_HOSTNAME:-localhost}/
- UWSGI_WORKERS=${SEARXNG_UWSGI_WORKERS:-4}
- UWSGI_THREADS=${SEARXNG_UWSGI_THREADS:-4}
logging:
driver: "json-file"
options:
max-size: "1m"
max-file: "1"
I love the self-hosted aspect. I love not seeing any ads on my search results. I did a few searches where I know what results to expect and it did okay. It is good right now at filtering out garbage in my results.
So I look forward to tweaking it and using it as a search backend with open web UI. Next on my list is having enough resources to run Ollama and a stable diffusion generator at the same time and have image generation working through open web UI.