Fess
Fess is an open-source, self-hosted app in the Search Engines category, licensed Apache-2.0 and written mainly in Java. It ships a Docker image. It has 1,142 GitHub stars and its last commit was on Oct 25, 2026 (data as of Oct 26, 2026).
GitHub stats
- GitHub stars
- 1,142
- Forks
- 177
- Open issues
- 15
- Commits, last 12 months
- 751
- Last commit
- Oct 25, 2026
- Latest release
- fess-15.9.0Oct 15, 2026
- Created
- Sep 13, 2013
- License
- Apache-2.0Open source
Data as of from the GitHub API. Report an error
Project health
ActiveActive: last commit Oct 25, 2026, 751 commits in 12 months.
- Regular releases10 or more releases in 12 months
| Last commit | Oct 25, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Commits, last 12 months | 751 |
| Latest release | fess-15.9.0 (Oct 15, 2026) |
| Releases, last 12 months | 10 or more |
| Releases, all time | 184 |
| Open issues | 15 |
| Open pull requests | 0 |
| Good first issues | 0 |
| Contributing guide | No |
| Security policy | No |
| Created | Sep 13, 2013 |
Health as of , from the GitHub API. A label describes activity, not quality or security. How we label project health · Report a data error
About Fess
Powerful and easily deployable Enterprise Search Server.
Description adapted from awesome-selfhosted (CC BY-SA 3.0). Source code: github.com/codelibs/fess.
Topics
- java
- elasticsearch
- full-text-search
- lucene
- crawler
- enterprise-search
- search-engine
- search
- ai-search
- docker
Repository preview
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Is Fess free and open source?
Yes. Fess is open-source software released under the Apache-2.0 license, so you can self-host it at no cost. You only pay for the server it runs on, and some projects also offer an optional paid cloud plan.
Can I run Fess with Docker?
Yes. Fess provides a Docker image, so you can run it on any Linux server with Docker and Docker Compose installed. The project README lists the image name and the environment variables to set.
What are the best alternatives to Fess?
Popular self-hosted alternatives to Fess include ElasticSearch, MeiliSearch and SearXNG.
Is Fess actively maintained?
The most recent commit to Fess was on Oct 25, 2026 with 751 commits in the past twelve months. The latest release is fess-15.9.0, published Oct 15, 2026. It had 15 open issues on GitHub. appsgit's project-health label for it is "Active" as of Oct 26, 2026.