searxngSettings.engines in librechat.yaml is ignored — engines hardcoded in @librechat/agents

[kaloona]

Describe the bug

The searxngSettings.engines value configured in librechat.yaml is silently ignored. Instead, @librechat/agents hardcodes the engines string directly in the source code.

Location of hardcoded value:
@librechat/agents/dist/cjs/tools/search/search.cjs, line ~164:

engines: "google,bing,duckduckgo"

The createSearXNGAPI() function only accepts instanceUrl and apiKey as parameters — the searxngSettings block from config is never passed in or read.

Expected behavior

The engines value from librechat.yaml should be used:

webSearch:
  searchProvider: "searxng"
  searxngSettings:
    engines: "google,bing,startpage,qwant"

Actual behavior

Regardless of the configured engines, SearXNG is always called with engines=google,bing,duckduckgo.

Why this matters

DuckDuckGo blocks SearXNG instances without residential IPs with persistent CAPTCHAs, making it effectively unusable for self-hosted instances. Users need to configure alternative engines (e.g. Startpage, Qwant) — but the config option has no effect.

Workaround

Patching search.cjs manually after each update via a volume mount override.

Environment

• LibreChat version: v0.8.7-rc1
• @librechat/agents version: 3.2.43

[danny-avila]

Thanks for the report. webSearch.searxngSettings.engines is not currently a supported LibreChat config setting, so this is not an ignored documented setting. Today SearXNG config supports searxngInstanceUrl and optional searxngApiKey.

That said, exposing SearXNG engine selection would be a reasonable enhancement request, especially for self-hosted instances where specific engines may be blocked. I’m going to treat this as a feature request rather than a bug.