hermes-skills/skills/devops/infrastructure-automation/references/searxng-self-hosted-search.md

Self-Hosted Web Search with SearXNG

Deploy SearXNG as a Docker container for unlimited, private web search. No API key needed, no rate limits.

Deployment

docker-compose.yml

services:
  searxng:
    image: searxng/searxng:latest
    container_name: searxng
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:8888:8080"  # localhost only
    volumes:
      - ./searxng-data:/etc/searxng:rw
    environment:
      - SEARXNG_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8080
      - SEARXNG_SECRET_KEY=${SEARXNG_SECRET_KEY}
    cap_drop:
      - ALL
    cap_add:
      - CHOWN
      - SETGID
      - SETUID
      - DAC_OVERRIDE

settings.yml (enable JSON API)

use_default_settings: true
server:
  secret_key: "..."
  image_proxy: true
search:
  formats:
    - html
    - json
limits:
  default:
    requests: 120
    time_range: 3600

Usage

curl -s "http://127.0.0.1:8888/search?q=query+here&format=json" | python3 -c "
import sys, json
d = json.load(sys.stdin)
for r in d['results'][:5]:
    print(f'  {r[\"title\"]} - {r[\"url\"]}')
"

How it fits with Firecrawl

Tool	Role	Cost
SearXNG	Search (finds links)	Free, unlimited
Firecrawl	Extraction (clean content)	API key, 500 free pages/mo