Rabbit Hole

AI search you can self-host. Web + Wikipedia + your files, with a clean multi-protocol API.

Apache 2.0 — run it yourself, plug in your own LLM key, no subscription.

What you get

• Perplexity-style web search agent (bring your own LLM — our gateway, or any OpenAI-compatible/Anthropic key) with streaming answers and inline citations.
• File / audio / video / PDF ingestion via the bundled job processor — uploaded media gets transcribed, parsed, and embedded into a searchable corpus (pgvector; ingest→embed pipeline landing, see issue #291).
• Two distribution surfaces: the chat Web UI and the rh CLI (@protolabsai/rabbit-hole-cli: search, research, ingest, status) for fleet agents to shell out to. An OpenAI-compatible API is also exposed.
• Optional Langfuse tracing.

The full graph / research workspace from earlier versions is being rebuilt. They're not part of the launch surface and are gated out of production builds; set NEXT_PUBLIC_ENABLE_RESEARCH_ATLAS=true if you want to poke at them in dev.

Quick start (self-host)

You need Docker with the Compose plugin and an LLM provider key.

git clone https://github.com/protoLabsAI/rabbit-hole.io.git
cd rabbit-hole.io
cp .env.example .env
# edit .env — set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (or OPENAI_API_KEY)
docker compose up -d

Open http://localhost:3399.

What's running:

• rabbit-hole — the Next.js search app
• job-processor — file/audio/video ingest pipeline
• postgres + postgres-jobs — sessions and the job queue
• minio + minio-init — object storage for uploaded files

What's not running by default:

• A web search backend. Without SEARXNG_ENDPOINT set, the agent only has Wikipedia. Run SearXNG on your network and point SEARXNG_ENDPOINT at it.

Configuration

All env vars live in .env. The required ones:

ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=...        # one of these is required
OPENAI_API_KEY=...

POSTGRES_PASSWORD=...        # any string; defaults work for local
POSTGRES_JOB_PASSWORD=...
MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=...

Recommended additions:

SEARXNG_ENDPOINT=http://searxng:8080   # enables web search beyond Wikipedia
GROQ_API_KEY=...                       # free Whisper transcription for audio uploads

See .env.example for the full list.

Local dev (without Docker)

pnpm install
pnpm run dev:rabbit-hole

Opens on http://localhost:3399. You still need a Postgres + MinIO instance reachable; the docker-compose.yml will give you those and you can run the Next.js app on the host.

Roadmap

Surface	Status
Web search UI (/)	shipping
Self-host docker-compose	shipping
rh CLI (@protolabsai/rabbit-hole-cli)	shipping
OpenAI-compatible API (/v1/chat/completions)	in progress
Corpus search (pgvector)	in progress (#291)
Research / Atlas workspace	rebuilding (dev flag)
Stripe-paid hosted tier	in progress

The HTTP MCP server and standalone A2A endpoint from earlier versions are retired — fleet agents use the rh CLI instead.

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.