[Setup]: Setting up searxng and firecrawl self hosted for hermes-agent

[boriken72]

What's Going Wrong?

When setting up locally hosted services for searxng and firecrawl found the following:

• Self-hosted searxng expects "SEARXng_INSTANCE_URL" - in the .env NOT SEARXNG_BASE_URL or SEARXNG_URL - did not work until i set it per the former here.,

• Firecrawl self hosted expects: FIRECRAWL_API_KEY (if no api key set to arbritrary value - otherwise it will stop) - without it validation fails and it will not use your self hosted instance,

• Need following plugins enabled for them to be used: web-firecrawl, web-searxng, web-search-plus

Steps Taken

Debugged the issue with hermes to determine where the configuration was not correct and updated based on it's code findings and the behavior being seen.

Installation Method

Install script (curl | bash)

Operating System

Debian 13.5

Python Version

Python 3.13.5

Hermes Version

hermes version Hermes Agent v0.16.0 (2026.6.5) · upstream 85503dc Project: /home/juan/.hermes/hermes-agent Python: 3.11.15 OpenAI SDK: 2.24.0

Debug Report

Full Error Output

No errors present - the web_search and web_scrape plugins were defaulting back to Nous Research using my api credits to conduct this function.

What I've Already Tried

No response

[teknium1]

Thanks for reporting the self-hosted setup ambiguity. This is now covered on current main; automated hermes-sweeper review verified the implementation and docs.

• plugins/web/firecrawl/provider.py:123-139 accepts FIRECRAWL_API_URL without FIRECRAWL_API_KEY; commit 363633e2b explicitly added that URL-only self-hosted path.
• website/docs/user-guide/features/web-search.md:101-108 documents FIRECRAWL_API_URL and states the API key is optional; :206-220 documents SEARXNG_URL and the explicit web.search_backend: searxng selection.
• plugins/web/searxng/provider.py:34-60 reads SEARXNG_URL for Hermes. The same guide distinguishes it from SEARXNG_BASE_URL, which belongs only to the SearXNG container configuration.
• The linked PRs docs: add self-hosted web backend setup #44218 and docs: add self-hosted web backend setup #44219 identified this same configuration/documentation concern. Current main contains a fuller maintained guide, shipped in v2026.7.1 via 135f235165b.