Hister

Private search engine that indexes the pages you visit and the files you keep

Alternative to: Rewind

Hister is a private, self-hosted search engine that builds a full-text index of the web pages you visit and the files you keep, so you can find them again later. Browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome index pages automatically, while a crawler and importers bring in existing browser history, bookmarks, and local files. It offers powerful field-filtered queries, optional semantic search through a configurable embeddings endpoint, and web, terminal, and MCP clients, with no telemetry or mandatory cloud service.

Hister Docker Compose example

Self-host Hister on your own server, homelab, or VPS starting from this Docker Compose example. It runs Hister in Docker containers using the official ghcr.io/asciimoo/hister:latest image, with persistent volumes and automatic restarts preconfigured. Review the environment variables and adjust them to your setup, save the file as compose.yml (or docker-compose.yml), and start the stack with docker compose up -d.

services:
  hister:
    image: ghcr.io/asciimoo/hister:latest
    init: true
    restart: unless-stopped
    # Upstream ships a hardened runtime: read-only root fs, no new privileges,
    # all Linux capabilities dropped, and a small writable /tmp tmpfs.
    read_only: true
    security_opt:
      - no-new-privileges:true
    cap_drop:
      - ALL
    volumes:
      - data:/hister/data
    tmpfs:
      - /tmp:noexec,nosuid,size=64m
    environment:
      # Address (host:port) the server binds inside the container. Keep 0.0.0.0 so the reverse proxy can reach it.
      HISTER__SERVER__ADDRESS: "0.0.0.0:4433"
      # Public URL where users reach Hister. Set this to your external https URL so generated links resolve correctly.
      HISTER__SERVER__BASE_URL: "http://localhost:4433"

volumes:
  data:

Prefer a managed setup? WinterFlow installs, configures, and updates Hister for you using this same Docker Compose configuration.