❗Note: If your use case is of log search (app and security logs) instead of app search (implement search feature in your application or website) then you should check openobserve/openobserve project built in rust that is specifically built for log search use case.

ZincSearch is a search engine that does full text indexing. It is a lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch and runs using a fraction of the resources. It uses bluge (via the vcaesar/riot fork) as the underlying indexing library.

It is very simple and easy to operate as opposed to Elasticsearch which requires a couple dozen knobs to understand and tune. You can get ZincSearch up and running in 2 minutes.

It is a drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch if you are just ingesting data using APIs and searching using kibana (Kibana is not supported with ZincSearch. ZincSearch provides its own UI).

Check the below video for a quick demo of ZincSearch.

While Elasticsearch is a very good product, it is complex and requires lots of resources and is more than a decade old. I built ZincSearch so it becomes easier for folks to use full text search indexing without doing a lot of work.

go + gin + react

1. Provides full text indexing capability
2. Single binary for installation and running. Binaries available under releases for multiple platforms.
3. Web UI for querying data written in React (embedded in the binary)
4. Compatibility with Elasticsearch APIs for ingestion of data (single record and bulk API)
5. Out of the box authentication
6. Schema less - No need to define schema upfront and different documents in the same index can have different fields.
7. Index storage in disk
8. aggregation support

Documentation is available at https://zincsearch-docs.zinc.dev/

Check Quickstart

ZincSearch has hundreds of production installations.

• CI (lint, go test on Linux/macOS/Windows, coverage): .github/workflows/ci.yml → https://github.com/zincsearch/zincsearch/actions/workflows/ci.yml
• Nightly dev image ghcr.io/zincsearch/zincsearch-dev:nightly: .github/workflows/nightly.yml → https://github.com/zincsearch/zincsearch/actions/workflows/nightly.yml
• Release (v* tags, goreleaser, ghcr.io/zincsearch/zincsearch): .github/workflows/release.yml → https://github.com/zincsearch/zincsearch/actions/workflows/release.yml

Note — Nightly / dev-image (push) fails on forks:

Error: buildx failed with: ERROR: failed to build: failed to solve: failed to push ghcr.io/zincsearch/zincsearch-dev:0.4.11-8792c59-dev: denied: permission_denied: The requested installation does not exist.

The workflow logs in to GHCR with the repository's GITHUB_TOKEN, which can only push packages under the owner of the repository running the workflow. On a fork the token has no access to the zincsearch org, so the push is denied. Either run the workflow from zincsearch/zincsearch, or change env.IMAGE in nightly.yml to ghcr.io/<your-owner>/zincsearch-dev (and make sure the package is linked to the repo / the repo has packages: write).

• How to develop and contribute to ZincSearch

  Check the contributing guide. Also check the roadmap

You can use ZincSearch to index and search any data. Here are some examples that folks have created to index and search enron email dataset using zincsearch:

1. https://github.com/jorgeloaiza48/Enron-Email-DataSet
2. https://github.com/jhojanperlaza/email_search_engine
3. https://github.com/carlosarraes/zinmail
4. https://github.com/devjopa/golab-search
5. https://github.com/avaco2312/zincsearch
6. https://github.com/paolorossig/email-indexer
7. https://github.com/ulimonte05/zincsearching