nixsearch

The Nix ecosystem has thousands of packages and options. Many solutions exist to help with rummaging through these options, and after running into frustrations with them, this is mine.

Goals

• Fast search core built with tantivy
  • Support a wide array of producer strategies, so many data sources can be easily mixed together
• Magical web frontend leveraging Datastar
  • https://nixsearch.thekoppe.com
  • Run it yourself: example config
• MCP frontend, to easily feed agents with options & source code

Public deployment and SEO

Set server.public_url to the canonical production origin before exposing nixsearch publicly:

[server]
public_url = "https://nixsearch.example.com"

When server.public_url is unset, public SEO is intentionally disabled: pages emit noindex, canonical/Open Graph metadata is omitted, robots.txt disallows crawling, and /sitemap.xml returns 404. This keeps local and private deployments out of search indexes by default.

Development

This section should be expanded on. But utilize the devenv defined in this flake with nix develop .#. Then, the cli can be run with cargo run -p nixsearch -- <command>.

Inspirations

This section can also be though of as "Motivations", since these past projects are what led to nixsearch.

• nixos-search: The official solution. Limited to primarily Nixpkgs & NixOS options.
• Searchix: I was a heavy Searchix user, and nixsearch is really just exactly what I wanted out of Searchix.
  Some key differences are:
  • Reliability
    • I would have frequent issues loading pages on Searchix, especially on unreliable internet
  • Better search algorithm
    • Tantivy provides a very strong search foundation, allowing nixsearch to resemble the powerful Grasshopper-powered search of nixos-search without compromises.
  • Refs as a primitive
    • Searchix doesn't have a solution to deal with multiple refs of the same source, such as 25.11 and unstable.
• NuschtOS/search: Another solution that focuses on building everything statically.

AI Disclosure

AI was utilized heavilty in the development of this project. But LLMs still can't manage to do even a search bar on their own, so nearly all code has gone through human eyes and hands. See the PLAN.md document to understand how context was initially scaffolded for this codebase.

Thanks for checking out nixsearch!