Hosting SearXNG is actually easy

I bet there is at least one thing in your life you just ignore and don’t deal with. Up until the point you get curious and slowy approach it. For me that was SearXNG. I heard about it, read about it and straight up ignored it. I told myself that there must be a line of crazyness out there and maybe this line is SearXNG.

I am the only one in my family with IT knowledge and i care a lot about my privacy and don’t want Big Tech to collect every possible information about me. I changed my browser and i used a “more privacy respecting” search engine. There was no need to change something, because everything was working as expected.

But than i gave SearXNG a try. I read the documentation and was surprised how easy the setup is.

services:
  searxng:
    image: docker.io/searxng/searxng:latest
    container_name: searxng
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8888:8080"
    volumes:
      - ./config/:/etc/searxng/
      - ./data/:/var/cache/searxng/

That’s it. Start the container and now SearXNG is available on port 8888. Let’s be honest. At this point self hosting your services cannot get easier than that. Of course you can adjust some env variables and do some other cool stuff, but that’s it. I don’t even know what else i should write about.

If you have your own server and 5 minutes of time. Just give it a try.