SearchHub

A local search engine for your browser bookmarks. Import bookmarks from Firefox, Zen, Chrome, or Chromium, search them with full-text queries, and optionally forward searches to external engines like crates.io (via its public JSON API) or SearXNG (aggregates results from dozens of backends). Content can be automatically tagged via local ONNX embeddings (opt-in; set tagging_enabled = true in config).

Install

Binaries are available at vit.am/~ololduck/search_hub/latest. Download the archive or the statically-linked binary for your architecture, extract, and run.

Source: Clone the repository and build with Rust:

Prerequisites: Rust (install via rustup).

git clone https://vit.am/~ololduck/search_hub/repository.git
cd search_hub
cargo install --path .

This installs the search_hub binary to ~/.cargo/bin/search_hub.

To update later, pull the latest code and reinstall.

First steps

# Import bookmarks from Firefox (auto-discovers your profile)
search_hub import firefox

# Import from Chrome
search_hub import chrome

# Start the web UI
search_hub serve

Open http://127.0.0.1:8080 in your browser. You can now search your bookmarks.

Search queries are also forwarded to external engines: crates.io via its public JSON API, and optionally SearXNG (which aggregates Google, Bing, DDG, and dozens more) if [[engines]] is configured. Works as a custom search provider in Firefox/Zen via the OpenSearch protocol (your browser should auto-discover it at /opensearch.xml).

CLI reference

Command	What it does
`search_hub serve`	Start web UI on port 8080
`search_hub serve --port 3000`	Start on a custom port
`search_hub import firefox`	Import bookmarks from Firefox
`search_hub import chrome`	Import from Chrome/Chromium
`search_hub import zen`	Import from Zen Browser
`search_hub search "query"`	Search bookmarks from the terminal
`search_hub list`	List all bookmarks
`search_hub insert "Title" https://..."`	Add a bookmark (fetches content, auto-tags if enabled)
`search_hub remove --id 1`	Delete a bookmark by ID
`search_hub retag --all`	Re-run auto-tagging (requires `tagging_enabled = true` in config)
`search_hub init-config`	Create a default config file at `~/.config/search_hub/config.toml`
`search_hub self-update`	Check abbaye Atom feed and update to the latest release
`search_hub self-update --dry-run`	Check for updates without downloading
`search_hub self-update --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu`	Override the target triple

All commands use ~/.local/share/search_hub/bookmarks.db by default. Override with --db-path or set db_path in the config file.

The first time you use a search or insert command, SearchHub downloads an ONNX embedding model to .fastembed_cache/ in the project directory (about 127 MB).

Configuration

Run search_hub init-config to create ~/.config/search_hub/config.toml with all available options commented out. Or create it manually:

# Bookmark database path (default: platform data directory)
# db_path = "/home/you/.local/share/search_hub/bookmarks.db"

# Custom tags override the built-in defaults
# [[tags]]
# name = "my-custom-tag"
# examples = ["example text one", "example text two"]

# Whether auto-tagging is enabled (default: false, requires ONNX model download on first use)
# tagging_enabled = true

# Minimum confidence for auto-tagging (0.0 to 1.0, default: 0.6)
# tagging_threshold = 0.6

# Hosts to skip when fetching content for bookmarking (default: local addresses)
# exclude_urls = ["localhost", "127.0.0.1", "::1"]

# Per-engine configuration (optional)
# Multiple instances supported (e.g., public + private crates.io registries)
[[engines]]
type = "searxng"
instance = "https://search.kael.ink"
# timeout_secs = 10.0  # optional per-engine timeout
# Best: use an existing public instance (see https://searx.space).
# Also possible: run your own with Docker:
#   docker run -d --name searxng -p 8888:8080 searxng/searxng

# Custom crates.io registry (optional)
# [[engines]]
# type = "crates_io"
# url = "https://registry.example.com/api/v1/crates?q={}&per_page=10"
# timeout_secs = 5.0

# Wikipedia search (optional, defaults to English)
# [[engines]]
# type = "wikipedia"
# lang = "fr"
# timeout_secs = 5.0

# MDN Web Docs search (optional, defaults to en-US)
# [[engines]]
# type = "mdn"
# locale = "fr"
# timeout_secs = 5.0

# Generic HTML-scraped engine (use with any search site)
# Provide a URL template with `{}` for the query and a CSS selector
# targeting the result container. Results are extracted from `<a>` links
# inside that container (deduplicated, up to 10, http/https only).
#
# Note: most commercial search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.)
# block automated requests. This engine works best with small/niche sites
# that don't enforce bot detection. To find the right selector, view the
# page source or use browser dev tools on the search results page.
# [[engines]]
# type = "generic"
# name = "DuckDuckGo"
# url = "https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q={}"
# selector = "div.results"
# timeout_secs = 10.0

Run the web server as a systemd user service

Keeps the web UI running in the background, starts automatically on login.

cp contrib/search-hub-web.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now search-hub-web.service

Check status with systemctl --user status search-hub-web. View logs with journalctl --user -u search-hub-web -f.

Auto-import with systemd

cp contrib/search-hub-import.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
cp contrib/search-hub-import.timer  ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now search-hub-import.timer

This imports bookmarks from Zen Browser daily. Edit the file to import from another browser.

Auto-update with systemd

cp contrib/search-hub-self-update.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
cp contrib/search-hub-self-update.timer  ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now search-hub-self-update.timer

This checks for new releases weekly and updates the binary automatically.

Run with Podman / Docker

A container image is available at oci.vit.am/search-hub:latest. It serves on port 8080 as the search_hub user and expects:

Config mounted at /home/search_hub/.config/search_hub/config.toml
Database directory mounted at /home/search_hub/.local/share/search_hub/

# Pull and run
podman run -d --name search-hub \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v ~/.config/search_hub:/home/search_hub/.config/search_hub:ro \
  -v ~/.local/share/search_hub:/home/search_hub/.local/share/search_hub \
  oci.vit.am/search-hub:latest serve

# SIGHUP reload (re-reads config)
podman kill -s HUP search-hub

# Build locally from the Containerfile
podman build -t search-hub:latest -f Containerfile .

docker-compose

docker compose up -d

See docker-compose.yaml at the project root. A SearXNG service is included as a commented-out example.

Podman Quadlet (systemd-native)

mkdir -p ~/.config/containers/systemd
cp contrib/search-hub.container ~/.config/containers/systemd/
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now search-hub

The Quadlet file uses %h (your home directory) for volume source paths.

Resources

Downloads: vit.am/~ololduck/search_hub/latest
Repository browser: vit.am/~ololduck/search_hub/repository
Git clone: git clone https://vit.am/~ololduck/search_hub/repository.git

Changes in 0.4.0

Added

self-update CLI command: checks abbaye Atom feed for new releases, downloads and replaces the binary
contrib/search-hub-self-update.{service,timer} for weekly automated updates
Wikipedia search engine (configurable lang, defaults to English)
MDN Web Docs search engine (configurable locale, defaults to en-US)
Generic HTML-scraped search engine (user-provided URL template + CSS selector)
Container build (Containerfile, .dockerignore) and push to oci.vit.am
docker-compose.yaml for one-command deployment
contrib/search-hub.container (Podman Quadlet) for systemd-native container management
SIGHUP reload: re-read config and swap engines without restart

Changed

Engine config switched from HashMap to Vec<EngineConfig> tagged enum
Config option enabled_engines removed (the engine list itself defines what's active)
reqwest switched from native-tls to rustls-tls (no system OpenSSL required)

Changed (CLI)

release.sh builds container image with buildah as part of release process