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==================================
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Limit access to your searx engines
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==================================
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Administrators might find themselves wanting to limit access to some of the
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enabled engines on their instances. It might be because they do not want to
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expose some private information through an offline engine. Or they
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would rather share engines only with their trusted friends or colleagues.
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Private engines
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===============
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To solve this issue private engines were introduced in :pull:`1823`.
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A new option was added to engines named `tokens`. It expects a list
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of strings. If the user making a request presents one of the tokens
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of an engine, he/she is able to access information about the engine
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and make search requests.
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Example configuration to restrict access to the Arch Linux Wiki engine:
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.. code:: yaml
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- name : arch linux wiki
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engine : archlinux
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shortcut : al
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tokens : [ 'my-secret-token' ]
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Unless a user has configured the right token, the engine is going
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to be hidden from him/her. It is not going to be included in the
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list of engines on the Preferences page and in the output of
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`/config` REST API call.
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Tokens can be added to one's configuration on the Preferences page
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under "Engine tokens". The input expects a comma separated list of
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strings.
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The distribution of the tokens from the administrator to the users
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is not carved in stone. As providing access to such engines
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implies that the admin knows and trusts the user, we do not see
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necessary to come up with a strict process. Instead,
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we would like to add guidelines to the documentation of the feature.
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Next steps
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==========
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Now that searx has support for both offline engines and private engines,
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it is possible to add concrete engines which benefit from these features.
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For example engines which search on the local host running the instance.
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Be it searching your file system or querying a private database. Be creative
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and come up with new solutions which fit your use case.
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Acknowledgement
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===============
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This development was sponsored by `Search and Discovery Fund`_ of `NLnet Foundation`_ .
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.. _Search and Discovery Fund: https://nlnet.nl/discovery
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.. _NLnet Foundation: https://nlnet.nl/
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| Happy hacking.
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| kvch // 2020.02.28 22:26
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