have you checked the directory & file permissions with ls -la /Your/SearXNG/WorkingDir ?

The error in your log is telling you that the container does not have permission to that directory/file, you can essentially bypass this with sudo chmod 777 /Your/SearXNG/WorkingDir/* and sudo chown 1000:1000 /Your/SearXNG/WorkingDir/*

However, if you’re looking for security best practices this is not advisable but if all you care about is that it works it should be fine.

Glad to see you got it working. One thing to add that you might find useful:

it shows 20054:8080 for a very short period when I start the stack and then disappeared

This is an indication that the container has stopped. Because you have restart: unless-stopped set, the container is stuck in a bootloop so portainer will always show a state of either starting or running. Docker container automatically stop when the application inside the container has exited or completed… Often because the application has encountered an error.

Some more information that may or may not be useful:

A good example of a container stopped because the application has finished is the Cross-seed container that people use to cross reference their torrents seeding in their bittorrent client with torrents available on other torrent trackers. In this case, the application runs a search on each tracker, downloads the files and once the search is done the application exits and then the docker container will stop.

Here is my searxng rocker compose:

services:
  redis:
    container_name: redis
    image: docker.io/valkey/valkey:7-alpine
    command: valkey-server --save 30 1 --loglevel warning
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - local_bridge
    volumes:
      - ./data/reddis:/data
    cap_drop:
      - ALL
    cap_add:
      - SETGID
      - SETUID
      - DAC_OVERRIDE
    logging:
      driver: "json-file"
      options:
        max-size: "1m"
        max-file: "1"

  searxng:
    container_name: searxng
    image: docker.io/searxng/searxng:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - local_bridge
      - proxy
    volumes:
      - ./data/searxng:/etc/searxng
    environment:
      - SEARXNG_BASE_URL=https://${SEARXNG_HOSTNAME:-localhost}/
      - SEARXNG_SECRET=${SEARXNG_SECRET}
    cap_drop:
      - ALL
    cap_add:
      - CHOWN
      - SETGID
      - SETUID
    logging:
      driver: "json-file"
      options:
        max-size: "1m"
        max-file: "1"

networks:
  local_bridge: # local bridge with ipv6 internet access
    driver: bridge
    enable_ipv6: true
  proxy:
    external: true

And my searxng settings:

searxng/data/searxng/settings.yml
# see https://docs.searxng.org/admin/settings/settings.html#settings-use-default-settings
use_default_settings: true

server:
  # base_url is defined in the SEARXNG_BASE_URL environment variable, see .env and docker-compose.yml
  limiter: false  # can be disabled for a private instance
  image_proxy: false
ui:
  static_use_hash: true
  query_in_title: true
  infinite_scroll: true
  default_theme: simple
  theme_args:
    # style of simple theme: auto, light, dark
    simple_style: dark
redis:
  url: redis://redis:6379/0


search:
  safe_search: 0
  autocomplete: 'duckduckgo'
  default_lang: "en"
  formats:
    - html
    - json


outgoing:
  # default timeout in seconds, can be override by engine
  request_timeout: 3.0


enabled_plugins:
  - 'Hash plugin'
  - 'Basic Calculator'
  - 'Self Informations'
  - 'Tracker URL remover'
  # - 'Ahmia blacklist'
  - 'Hostnames plugin'  # see 'hostnames' configuration below
  - 'Open Access DOI rewrite'

And the proxy network is just the docker network that nginx is connected to. Here is my nginx conf https://github.com/muntedcrocodile/nginxconf .

Did you accidently typo the url? I see a ‘/’ instead of a ‘:’ before the port number.

try going to http://mydomainname:20054/

Might also need to fix the searchx_base_url env variable

You kind of need caddy to act as a reverse proxy for that. Or are you using a different reverse proxy?

deleted by creator

I’ve never used portainer sorry.

If you see the published port for a very short time then something might be crashing when it tries to start.

docker logs searxng from cli might be revealing

edit: I do have a searxng container and my compose.yml is very similar to yours. I guess we both copied the example. The only difference I can see is that you still have the env variables for UWSGI_WORKERS and UWSGI_THREADS. I just set both of those to 4 instead of using the SEARXNG_ env vars