fess

Why we included this project

Fess is a self-hosted search server that makes sense when your documents live in many places at once. Its built-in crawler pulls in web pages, Office files, PDFs, and archives, and because the whole thing runs on OpenSearch, you get faceted full-text search without writing your own indexing pipeline. The browser-based admin UI means you don't need deep OpenSearch knowledge to keep it running, and SSO options like LDAP and SAML help it fit into an existing enterprise setup. If you want to feed results into an LLM assistant, Fess also supports semantic and RAG-style retrieval while preserving role-based access controls. Docker images make it quick to try locally.