this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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Hello,

After finally getting SearXNG to start with Podman, I wanted to adjust the configuration.

So I logged into the container and used vi to edit the settings.yml file, which is loaded when the container is first started. The container then stored these settings accordingly.

$podman exec -it searxng /bin/sh /usr/local/searxng # vi /etc/searxng/settings.yml

Extract

general:

Debug mode, only for development. Is overwritten by ${SEARXNG_DEBUG}

debug: false

displayed name

instance_name: "Test SearXNG"

For example: https://example.com/privacy

privacypolicy_url: false

use true to use your own donation page written in searx/info/en/donate.md

use false to disable the donation link

donation_url: false

mailto:contact@example.com

contact_url: true

record stats

enable_metrics: true

expose stats in open metrics format at /metric

saved and another restart

$podman restart searxng

I then checked again as described above to see if the configuration was still there after the restart. It was still there.

Unfortunately, however, the name SearXNG is still used in the title, which means that the configuration is not loaded.

Since I was stuck, I decided to ask ChatGPT. I was then told to replace the pod with

podman run -d --name searxng
-p 0.0.0.0:5234:8080
-e SEARXNG_BASE_URL=http://192.168.4.15:5234/
-e SEARXNG_SECRET=dfsj323qjwkjqfjadkj
-e SEARXNG_SETTINGS_PATH=/etc/searxng/settings.yml
--uidmap +$(id -u):977:1 --gidmap +$(id -g):977:1 --user=0:0
-v /opt/podman/searxng/config:/etc/searxng:Z
ghcr.io/searxng/searxng:latest
python3 -m searx

Unfortunately, this did not help. Another recommendation was to edit the template in the container. That might work until the next version, but I still won't be able to configure anything.

Does anyone have any idea how I can get SearXNG to load the configuration?

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[–] nottelling@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

At some point you had to learn all about debugging the overly-complicated and annoying OS that runs your full installs, didn't you?

[–] 30p87@feddit.org 1 points 2 weeks ago

No, knowing literally "systemctl enable --now" and "journalctl -ru" is not even learning. The level of knowledge of the OS needed for running a native package vs a container is exactly the same.