TorXNG is a lightweight, hardened metasearch engine that sends every request through the Tor network. It asks many search engines at once, without tracking or profiling its users, and the search engines only ever see Tor exit relays, never the server that runs TorXNG.

TorXNG is a fork of SearXNG.

TorXNG is based on SearXNG, upstream commit 12f8b6515 (September 2026), and keeps its complete history and authors. Since 2026-09-26 it has been modified to run only through Tor, to be lighter and to be hardened. The changes are listed in section 12 of torxng/README.md. All credit for the metasearch engine itself goes to the SearXNG contributors.

• Tor-only. TorXNG refuses to start without a Tor SOCKS proxy (socks5h://, default 127.0.0.1:9050, set another one with SEARXNG_TOR_PROXY). There is no setting to turn Tor off, and nothing can be sent before the network layer is set up.
• Isolated circuits. Requests are spread over several Tor circuits with different exit relays; search circuit to see them.
• Onion service. The Docker stack also publishes TorXNG as a Tor v3 onion service.
• Hardened. Read-only, non-root containers without capabilities, a strict Content-Security-Policy, rate limits, and no search terms in the logs.
• Light. About 160 MiB of memory for the whole stack including Tor, and a small set of search engines that work over Tor.

With Docker (recommended; see section 7 of torxng/README.md for the secrets that have to be created first):

cd torxng
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d --build --wait

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8080/ or the onion address shown by docker compose exec tor cat /var/lib/tor/searxng/hostname in Tor Browser.

Without Docker, make run needs a running Tor, either the Tor daemon on 127.0.0.1:9050 or Tor Browser:

SEARXNG_TOR_PROXY=socks5h://127.0.0.1:9150 make run

• torxng/README.md: architecture, the Tor-only guarantee, hardening, cryptographic background, measurements and limitations.
• torxng/tests/README.md: the edge-case and security test suite.
• The SearXNG documentation remains the reference for general settings.

TorXNG is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL-3.0), like SearXNG; see LICENSE. If you run TorXNG as a service for other people, they must be able to get the source code of the version you run. The "Source code" link in the footer of every page points to this repository.