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Docker – Error while enabling the Searxng as web search engine in Open Web UI

I want to enable seachxng – meta search engine in my Open WebUI (formerly Ollama Web UI).

I have written the docker compose file as below but the problem is, when I open Open Web UI and selected the ‘searxng‘ as my web search option, added ‘http://searxng:8080/search?q=<query>‘ as a searxng Query URL. After that, in the Open Web UI Chat box, I enable the Web Search option and asked the question ‘who is a winner of Euro 2024?‘. It gets me this error:

403 Client Error: FORBIDDEN for url: http://searxng:8080/search?q=who+is+euro+2024+winner&format=json&pageno=1&safesearch=1&language=en-US&time_range=&categories=&theme=simple&image_proxy=0

Therefore, could not get the results via web searching and got error every time.

Could you please tell me how to successfull yenable the web search engine ‘searxng’ in my Open Web UI?

I have written the docker-compose.yml file as below:

services:

  webui:
    image: ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main
    ports:
      - 3000:8080
   
    environment:
      OLLAMA_BASE_URL: http://ollama:11434
      SEARXNG_URL: http://searxng:8088
      ENABLE_RAG_WEB_SEARCH: True
      RAG_WEB_SEARCH_ENGINE: "searxng"
      RAG_WEB_SEARCH_RESULT_COUNT: 4
      RAG_WEB_SEARCH_CONCURRENT_REQUESTS: 12
      SEARXNG_QUERY_URL: "http://searxng:8088/search?q=<query>"

    volumes:
      - open-webui:/app/backend/data
    depends_on:
     - ollama
     - searxng
    restart: always
    

  ollama:
    image: ollama/ollama:latest
    ports:
     - 11434:11434
    healthcheck:
      test: ollama --version || exit 1
    command: serve
    volumes:
      - ollama:/root/.ollama
      - ./start_ollama.sh:/start_ollama.sh
    restart: always
    entrypoint: [ "/usr/bin/bash", "/start_ollama.sh" ]

  searxng:
    image: searxng/searxng:latest
    ports:
      - "8888:8080"
    environment:
      - BASE_URL=http://searxng:8088/
    restart: always

volumes:
  open-webui:
  ollama:
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2

Answers


  1. 0

    I ran into same issue. The problem is that by default the SearXNG seems to only support format=html. I don’t know what is the best way to resolve this but you can get format=json working by editing /etc/searxng/settings.yml and adding json to the enabled search formats. Would be nice to have environment variable for this for the docker image.

    search:
  # remove format to deny access, use lower case.
  # formats: [html, csv, json, rss]
  formats:
    - html
    - json

    This is what I successfully use with my app:

      searxng:
    container_name: searxng
    image: searxng/searxng:${SEARXNG_DOCKER_TAG-latest}
    volumes:
      - ./searxng:/etc/searxng
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    environment:
      - BASE_URL=http://localhost:8080
      - INSTANCE_NAME=${SEARXNG_NAME-searxng}

    Base url should be set properly, http://0.0.0.0:8080 might be more approppriate for container but localhost seems to work.

    I have the modified ./searxng/settings.yml given to searxng as a volume mount.

    To see if you can access the searxng, try with curl from your webui container.

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  2. 0

    The issue is that port 8080 is being used by OpenWebUI inside it’s docker container by default. Even though you see it on port 3000 outside of docker, inside it’s own docker it’s connecting to itself when it tries localhost:8080 or any equivalent.

    From OpenWebUI’s perspective localhost:8080 is internal to the container. It needs to be remapped so that either SearxNG is on a different port relative to OpenWebUI or OpenWebUI is calling it as a named service. Honestly, named services are the best way to address this because it prevents conflicts from everything else that wants to use these ultra common ports.

    There’s some directions on how to remap it located here: https://docs.openwebui.com/tutorials/integrations/web_search/

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