Perplexideez

Self-hosted AI-powered search.

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About The Project

There are many self-hosted Perplexity clones out there. I chose to make my own as I was dissatisfied with their non-existent integration with other self-hosted services and lack of multi-user support. Perplexideez is backed by a Postgres database & either Ollama or OpenAI compatible endpoints. It searches the web using a SearXNG instance.

Table of Contents

1. About The Project
2. Features
   1. Search the web
   2. Know where conclusions come from
      1. Learn even more
   3. Keep track of your most interesting searches
   4. Customise your experience
   5. Multi-user support & SSO
   6. Sharing searches
      1. Simple UI
      2. Access control
      3. Good looking embeds
   7. Deployment
      1. Security
      2. Statelessness
3. Deploying
   1. Container images
   2. Docker
   3. Kubernetes
   4. Bare metal
   5. General notes about dependencies
      1. SearXNG
   6. Environment variables
      1. Data storage
      2. App setup
      3. SSO
         1. Notes
      4. SearXNG
      5. AI setup
         1. OpenAI
         2. Ollama
4. Built with
5. Developing locally
   1. Prerequisites
   2. Installation
6. Roadmap
7. Contributing
8. License
9. Contact
10. Acknowledgments

Features

Search the web

Let AI do the hard work of sifting through search results for you.

Know where conclusions come from

Don't worry about hallucinations ruining your research. Just hover over the source annotation your LLM inserted and see the source it used. Click on it, and view the source directly.

Learn even more

Your LLM will generate great follow-up questions for you. This way, you can ask about what interested you in the response without typing a single second.

Keep track of your most interesting searches

Stash your favourite searches as favourites. This way, you'll never lose them.

Customise your experience

Perplexideez lets you use different models for different tasks, as appropriate. The robust environment variables and UI configuration allow you to make sure your self hosted resources are not overused.

Multi-user support & SSO

Perplexideez supports many user accounts, with separated data, and using OIDC SSO. You can disable either sign up, password login, or both.

Sharing searches

Simple UI

Perplexideez allows you to share links to others with the results of your searches. This way, you can send the interesting stuff to your friends easily.

Access control

When sharing a link, you can make sure only the people you want have access to it. Reroll the link's ID, require authentication to view, or disable it altogether.

Good looking embeds

Perplexideez creates beautiful embeds for all the links you share publicly. This way, the people you send it to know what they'll be looking at.

Deployment

Security

All of the containers provided by this project run as non-root by default. They're ready to be deployed in rootless environments.

Statelessness

Save for an in-progress generation, the containers are fully stateless. The feature that blocks exiting while a response is generated is still a work in progress, but they're ready to run in a Kubernetes environment without concern about rolling updates or higher numbers of replicas screwing things up.

Deploying

Container images

• ghcr.io/brunostjohn/perplexideez/migrate performs required database migrations and prepares your Postgres instance to be used with Perplexideez. The only environment variable it requires is DATABASE_URL.
• ghcr.io/brunostjohn/perplexideez/app is the app itself. It requires the full environment variables mentioned below.

Docker

Use the example Compose files in deploy/docker to configure your own stack. These include the app, SearXNG, and a database. Use the .env.example to get started, before running rename to .env and make sure all the required values from the table below are filled out. The example stack does not provide neither Ollama nor OpenAI compatible endpoints. Setting that up is up to you.

Kubernetes

I am still working on the Helm chart for this app. Writing Helm charts is quite the process so I'm procrastinating it. For now, please use my homelab Kubernetes manifests as an example for how to write your own to deploy this on your cluster.

Bare Metal

Due to a lack of control over these environments and high variance between them, deploying without using container images is unsupported and such issues will go closed due to being out of scope.

General notes about dependencies

SearXNG

• In my testing, it's very likely that Perplexideez will trigger SearXNG's limiter. Therefore, unless someone finds a better solution, it's better left disabled.
• All requests to SearXNG will fail unless JSON output is enabled. This is important, so please remember to adjust your configuration.

Environment Variables

Data Storage

Name	Required	Value	Example
DATABASE_URL	✅	An URL to a Postgres database.	postgresql://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/postgres?schema=public

App Setup

Name	Required	Value	Example
PUBLIC_BASE_URL	✅	The public-facing URL to your instance.	https://perplexideez.domain.com
RATE_LIMIT_SECRET	✅	A secret generated with openssl rand -base64 32 to be used for securing your sign in page.	N/A
AUTH_SECRET	✅	A secret generated with openssl rand -base64 32 to be used for securing your instance.	N/A
DISABLE_SIGN_UP	❌ (default: false)	Whether or not to disable signing up to your instance.	true/false
LOG_LEVEL	❌ (default: info)	Which log level the app should use.	trace/debug/info/warn/error
LOG_MODE	❌ (default: json)	Whether to pretty print logs or use JSON logging.	pretty/json
METRICS_PORT	❌ (default: 9001)	The port on which Prometheus metrics will be exposed.	9001
SKIP_CSRF_CHECK	❌ (default: false)	Makes the app skip CSRF checks. You most likely don't need this. Only set this if you know what you're doing.	true/false
USE_SECURE_COOKIES	❌ (default: true)	Make the app use secure cookies (only transferred over https). Only set this if you're not exposing your app.	true/false

SSO

Name	Required	Value	Example
OIDC_CLIENT_ID	❌	The client ID for your IDP.	N/A
OIDC_CLIENT_SECRET	❌	The client secret for your IDP.	N/A
OIDC_ISSUER	❌	The .well-known URL for you IDP.	https://auth.authentik.com/application/o/perplexideez/.well-known/openid-configuration
OIDC_SCOPES	❌ (default: openid email profile)	The OIDC scopes to request from your IDP.	openid email profile
PUBLIC_OIDC_NAME	❌	The identity provider name to show in the app's UI.	Zefir's Cloud
DISABLE_PASSWORD_LOGIN	❌ (default: false)	Whether or not to disable password authentication and hide it from the UI.	true/false

SSO notes

• The redirect URL for this app is https://perplexideez.yourdomain.com/auth/callback/generic-oauth.

SearXNG

Name	Required	Value	Example
SEARXNG_URL	✅	The URL for your SearXNG instance.	http://searxng:8080

AI Setup

Name	Required	Value	Example
LLM_MODE	✅	ollama	Which LLM provider to use.
LLM_SPEED_MODEL	✅	The LLM to use for generating responses in "Speed" mode.	gemma2:2b
LLM_BALANCED_MODEL	✅	The LLM to use for generating responses in "Balanced" mode.	llama3.1:latest
LLM_QUALITY_MODEL	✅	The LLM to use for generating responses in "Quality" mode.	qwen2.5:32b
LLM_EMBEDDINGS_MODEL	✅	The LLM to use for text embeddings.	nomic-embed-text:latest
LLM_TITLE_MODEL	✅	The LLM to use for generating chat titles.	llama3.1:latest
LLM_EMOJI_MODEL	✅	The LLM to use for generating chat emojis.	llama3.1:latest
LLM_IMAGE_SEARCH_MODEL	✅	The LLM to use for image searching.	llama3.1:latest
LLM_VIDEO_SEARCH_MODEL	✅	The LLM to use for video searching.	llama3.1:latest

OpenAI

Required only if LLM_MODE is set to openai.

Name	Required	Value	Example
OPENAI_BASE_URL	✅	The base URL to your OpenAI compatible endpoints.	https://chat.domain.com/v1
OPENAI_API_KEY	✅	The API key to use for requests.	sk-1234

Ollama

Required only if LLM_MODE is set to ollama.

Name	Required	Value	Example
OLLAMA_URL	✅	The URL for your Ollama instance.	http://ollama:11434

Built With

• SvelteKit
• TailwindCSS
• Shadcn Svelte
• tRPC
• Prisma
• AuthJS
• TanStack Query
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Langchain

Developing Locally

To get a local copy up and running follow these simple example steps.

Prerequisites

You need either an OpenAI API token/OpenAI compatible API or an Ollama instance running somewhere. The development container setup only provides Postgres and SearXNG.

• pnpm

  corepack install pnpm

Installation

1. Clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/brunostjohn/perplexideez.git

2. Install packages

   pnpm install

3. Create a .env file using the .env.example
4. Start the development environment

   pnpm dev:up

5. Update the database schema

   pnpm db:push

6. Run the app

   pnpm dev

Roadmap

• Fully support web searching
• Shareable no-authentication links
• Full statelessness
  • Block exiting while generating, just in case
  • Use Redis to persist internal generation state
• View & explore image/video suggestions.
• Favourites on the sidebar
• Ensure deployments work
  • Complete Helm chart for Kubernetes deployment
• More agents
  • Web agents
  • Self-hosted app agents

See the open issues for a full list of proposed features (and known issues).

Contributing

Contributions are what make the open source community such an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

If you have a suggestion that would make this better, please fork the repo and create a pull request. You can also simply open an issue with the tag "enhancement". Don't forget to give the project a star! Thanks again!

1. Fork the Project
2. Create your Feature Branch (git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature)
3. Commit your Changes (git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature')
4. Push to the Branch (git push origin feature/AmazingFeature)
5. Open a Pull Request

License

Distributed under the AGPL License.

Contact

Bruno St John - me@brunostjohn.com

Acknowledgments

• The Perplexica team for implementing the basis for a self-hosted search AI agent.