Deploy and Host SearXNG on Railway

SearXNG is a free, open-source metasearch engine that combines results from many search providers without building a personal search profile. It offers a familiar web interface, configurable engines, categories for web, image, news, and other searches, and JSON responses for privacy-conscious applications that need a self-hosted search endpoint.

About Hosting SearXNG

Hosting SearXNG on Railway requires one public container running the immutable SearXNG image, a public HTTPS domain targeting port 8080, and a strong SEARXNG_SECRET generated when the template is deployed. The container creates /etc/searxng/settings.yml from its built-in template when the configuration volume is empty, so no application-specific settings file has to be supplied for the first deployment. The draft persists /etc/searxng; SearXNG's /var/cache/searxng cache is rebuildable and remains ephemeral because Railway currently permits only one volume per service. Set SEARXNG_LIMITER=false when the instance is called by trusted applications that do not provide proxy bot-detection headers.

Common Use Cases

Running a private, privacy-respecting alternative to centralized web search
Providing a self-hosted search backend for dashboards, assistants, and other applications
Combining web, image, news, video, and specialized search engines behind one configurable interface

Dependencies for SearXNG Hosting

The digest-pinned ghcr.io/searxng/searxng:2026.7.26-b060c780d container image
One Railway public service domain targeting container port 8080
One Railway persistent volume mounted at /etc/searxng for generated configuration
Outbound network access to the external search engines selected in SearXNG

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Single Railway service named SearXNG, with no underscore in the service name so the generated hostname remains compatible with Werkzeug.
The exact image digest is sha256:d0aaeb14880e6e92bde1518fcc7261e995783367d63d95203383607bef9c6516.
Railway exposes HTTPS on port 8080, checks /, and restarts the service with ON_FAILURE and up to 10 retries.
SEARXNG_SECRET is generated with Railway's ${{secret(64, "abcdef0123456789")}} function; SEARXNG_LIMITER=false disables the limiter for callers that cannot provide the expected proxy headers.
The requested Umbrel contract names /etc/searxng and /var/cache/searxng as separate mounts. Railway's current platform limit allows only one volume per service, so this draft uses /etc/searxng; the cache path is non-authoritative and can be recreated.

This is a community-maintained deployment template and does not imply affiliation with or endorsement by SearXNG.

Why Deploy SearXNG on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying SearXNG on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.