Installation

webx ships as a single static binary. No runtime dependencies are required for HTTP fetching, metasearch, indexing, or the HTTP API — Chrome is only needed if you use real-browser rendering.

Install the binary

• go install

  go install github.com/kasyap1234/webx/cmd/webx@latest
  webx --version

• From source

  git clone https://github.com/kasyap1234/webx
  cd webx
  go build -o webx ./cmd/webx
  ./webx --version

• Docker

  docker compose up -d        # webx serve + searxng, see Self-hosting

Optional: render engines

Static HTTP fetch needs nothing extra. For JavaScript-heavy pages, install an engine once — webx auto-detects it:

webx install chrome       # Chrome for Testing (via rod's downloader)
webx install lightpanda   # Lightpanda — ~16x lighter than Chrome

Or delegate rendering entirely:

• WEBX_RENDER_URL — remote render service; the CLI never launches a browser
• WEBX_CDP_URL — attach to an existing Chrome over CDP (browserless/steel-style)
• WEBX_CHROME_BIN — point at a system Chrome/Chromium instead of downloading

Optional: LLM + embeddings

Features that synthesize (extract, ask --llm, research, verify, act:<english> actions) or embed (query --semantic, crawl --semantic, auto-embed on index) use OpenAI-compatible endpoints. Ollama works out of the box — see Configuration.

The server binary

webx serve runs the HTTP API from the same binary. For production, build the dedicated server:

go build -o webxd ./cmd/webxd   # multi-tenant API server — Postgres-capable store

Where state lives

Path	Contents
~/.webx/index.db	FTS5 index + embeddings (default; --collection <name> → index-<name>.db)
~/.webx/jobs.db	Durable job queue
~/.webx/profiles/	Persistent browser profiles (--profile)
~/.webx/bin/	webx install engines