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Fess

Powerful enterprise search server easy to deploy

Search Engines ★ 1.1k stars Medium setup Apache-2.0

Fess is an open-source enterprise search server that crawls websites, file systems and databases to provide a unified full-text search interface. It is built on OpenSearch and is self-hosted.

Official siteSource code

Key features

  • Crawls web and file systems
  • Unified full-text search
  • OpenSearch-based
  • Self-hostable

Strengths

  • Released under the Apache-2.0 license
  • First-class Docker support for quick deployment
  • Active community (1.1k GitHub stars)
  • Written in Java

Is Fess secure?

No known vulnerabilities affect Fess's latest release (fess-15.8.0). OSV.dev lists 2 past advisories for the project; none of them applies to this release. No known vulnerabilities is not proof of security: it means none have been publicly catalogued.

  • Most recent fixed advisory CVE-2025-48382, published 2025-05-27 (505 days ago), fixed in 14.19.2

Source: OSV.dev, checked 2026-10-14. How this is measured.

Fess replaces

Self-hosted Google Search Appliance alternatives

Health badge

Maintain Fess? Add its health score to your README. The badge links back to this page.

SelfHostIndex: 86 · excellent

Markdown
[![SelfHostIndex health score for Fess](https://selfhostindex.com/badge/fess-search.svg)](https://selfhostindex.com/app/fess-search/)
HTML
<a href="https://selfhostindex.com/app/fess-search/"><img src="https://selfhostindex.com/badge/fess-search.svg" alt="SelfHostIndex health score for Fess"></a>
reStructuredText
.. image:: https://selfhostindex.com/badge/fess-search.svg
   :alt: SelfHostIndex health score for Fess
   :target: https://selfhostindex.com/app/fess-search/

The score is recomputed on every nightly rebuild from public repository data — see how it is calculated.

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