ZincSearch

ZincSearch is a lightweight, self‑hosted full‑text search engine engineered to replace Elasticsearch for application‑search workloads. Built in Go, it bundles a single statically compiled binary that runs on any platform with minimal dependencies. The core indexing engine is powered by Bluge, a pure‑Go library inspired by Lucene, which provides efficient inverted index structures while keeping memory footprints low. ZincSearch exposes a subset of the Elasticsearch REST API, enabling seamless ingestion through single‑document and bulk endpoints without requiring any client SDK changes. The search experience is delivered via a Vue‑based web UI that offers query building, aggregation visualization, and user management.

• Full‑text indexing with tokenization, stemming, and n‑gram support out of the box.
• Schema‑less design – documents in the same index may contain arbitrary fields; field types are inferred on first write.
• Elasticsearch‑compatible APIs for ingestion and search, making it a drop‑in replacement for existing pipelines.
• Aggregation support (terms, histograms, date histograms) comparable to Elasticsearch’s aggregation framework.
• Authentication & RBAC built‑in, with support for LDAP and OAuth through extensions.
• Disk‑backed storage; indexes are persisted to local file system, enabling fast cold starts.
• Zero‑config – a single binary with no external services; everything is configurable via environment variables or a JSON config file.

The choice of Go ensures low runtime overhead, fast startup times (under 5 s for a fresh index), and excellent cross‑platform binaries. Bluge’s compact on‑disk format keeps the memory usage below 1 GB for typical workloads, making ZincSearch ideal for resource‑constrained environments.

• Ingestion: PUT /index/_doc/{id} for single documents and POST /index/_bulk with newline‑delimited JSON.
• Search: Standard GET /index/_search with query DSL compatible with Elasticsearch’s Query DSL (bool, match, term, range).
• Aggregations: aggs field supports terms, histograms, date_histogram, and percentile ranks.
• Index Management: PUT /index to create an index, DELETE /index to drop it.
• Snapshot/Restore: REST endpoints for creating index snapshots and restoring them from local or remote storage.
• Webhooks: Custom webhook triggers on document creation, update, or deletion for real‑time integrations.
• Plugin System: Go plugins can extend the server with new authentication providers, custom analyzers, or external storage backends.

ZincSearch is designed for easy self‑hosting:

• Containerization: Official Docker images are available; a single container runs the server and UI.
• High Availability: Multiple instances can be run behind a load balancer; the index is shared via NFS or S3‑compatible object storage for read replicas.
• Scalability: Benchmarks show linear scaling with additional CPU cores; memory consumption grows linearly with index size.
• Resource Footprint: A typical 10 GB dataset runs comfortably on a 2‑core, 4 GB RAM VM.
• Monitoring: Prometheus metrics are exposed on /metrics; integration with Grafana dashboards is straightforward.

Developers can hook ZincSearch into existing stacks with minimal friction:

• SDK Compatibility: Existing Elasticsearch clients (Python, Java, Node) work without modification.
• Webhooks & Callbacks: Trigger external services on data changes, enabling real‑time analytics pipelines.
• Custom Analyzers: Extend the default analyzer set by registering Go plugins that implement the Analyzer interface.
• UI Customization: The Vue UI is open source; developers can fork and add custom panels or modify query builders.
• OpenTelemetry: ZincSearch exposes trace data compatible with OpenTelemetry collectors for distributed tracing.

• Documentation: Comprehensive online docs (https://zincsearch-docs.zinc.dev/) cover API reference, configuration, and migration guides.
• Community: Active GitHub discussions, a public Slack channel, and regular releases (semantic versioning).
• Testing: High test coverage (~90%) with Codecov badges; CI pipelines ensure stability before every release.
• Configuration: Environment‑driven settings (e.g., ZINC_INDEX_DIR, ZINC_AUTH_ENABLED) allow zero‑touch deployments on Kubernetes or bare metal.
• Extensibility: The plugin architecture encourages community contributions; several authentication and storage plugins already exist.

1. App Search – Embed a search bar in SaaS products or internal tools