SearXNG Integration

SearXNG is a privacy-respecting metasearch engine that aggregates results from multiple search providers. It’s included in the default Docker Compose setup and powers the web_search tool.

Default setup

The Docker Compose configuration starts SearXNG with:

searxng:
  image: searxng/searxng:2026.2.16
  ports:
    - "8080:8080"

Configuration

Frona settings

Variable	Value	Description
FRONA_SEARCH_PROVIDER	searxng	Use SearXNG as the search provider
FRONA_SEARCH_SEARXNG_BASE_URL	http://searxng:8080	SearXNG endpoint URL

SearXNG settings

SearXNG has its own configuration file (settings.yml). To customize it, mount a config file:

searxng:
  volumes:
    - ./searxng/settings.yml:/etc/searxng/settings.yml

Enable JSON format

Frona fetches search results from SearXNG as JSON. By default, SearXNG only enables HTML output. You need to enable the json format in your settings.yml:

search:
  formats:
    - html
    - json

Without this, the web_search tool will fail because SearXNG won’t return JSON responses.

Other customizations

• Engines: enable/disable specific search engines
• Rate limiting: adjust rate limits for search engines
• Language and region: set default search language

Search engines

SearXNG aggregates results from many search engines. By default, it queries a broad set including Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others. You can customize which engines are active in the SearXNG settings.

Alternative search providers

If you prefer not to self-host a search engine, Frona also supports:

• Tavily: API-based search service
• Brave: Brave Search API

Set FRONA_SEARCH_PROVIDER to the provider name and configure the appropriate API key.

Troubleshooting

• No search results: verify SearXNG is running (docker compose ps searxng)
• Slow searches: some upstream search engines may be slow or rate-limited
• Empty results from specific engines: check SearXNG logs for engine-specific errors
• Test directly: curl http://localhost:8080/search?q=test&format=json should return results