Casper (Formerly, Indexor)

Casper is a Discord bot that searches the web for you. Casper gets the best results from around the web and returns them directly to your Discord channel.

Unlike other web searching Discord bots, Casper is not restricted to getting results from a single search engine. Instead, Casper is powered by the metasearch engine SearXNG to get results from many sources simultaneously.

In addition to Casper's current features, there are many exciting features planned for future updates, including:

Multiple pages of results
Results caching for faster response times
Support for getting results from specific search engines
User-Added search engines (Anything powered by the OpenSearch standard)
Server and User based custom configurations
Direct messaging the bot to get answers from anywhere on the web
Support for other message platforms such as Slack, Telegram, Matrix.org, and others.

Installation

The easiest way to get Access to Casper is to follow this invite link to invite Casper to join any Discord Server you own.

Invite Casper to your Server

Want to get Casper running on your own? Follow the instructions below to get started:

Prerequisites

A new Discord Bot and associated token
A SearXNG instance running somewhere accessible to wherever you will have Casper running. Casper WILL NOT RESPOND UNLESS YOU HAVE CONFIGURED SEARXNG CORRECTLY

Installing Casper

The quickest way to install Casper is to pull the Docker image:

docker pull speratus/casper
docker run -d -e DISCORD_TOKEN=<REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_TOKEN> -e ENGINE_URL=<URL_TO_SEARXNG> speratus/casper

Make sure your ENGINE_URL variable has the format https://example.com or http://127.0.0.1. IP Addresses are acceptable to Casper as long as the HTTP scheme is specified at the beginning

Configuring a SearXNG Instance

Follow the instructions in SearXNG's documentation to set up a working instance. I recommend using their Docker image.

Once you have a SearXNG instance running, there are two additional configuration rules required to enable Casper to use your SearXNG Instance:

The limiter feature must be disabled. This is usually disabled by default, so you will likely not need to worry about this one.
Make sure that the json format is enabled. Enable JSON formatting
In some cases, you may need to disable the SoundCloud search engine

Because the limiter needs to be disabled for Casper to function, I HIGHLY recommend that you do not expose your SearXNG instance to the public internet.

Once You have put these settings in place, replace the ENGINE_URL variable above with the address of your SearXNG instance and Casper will communicate with it.

NOTE: Both SearXNG and Casper will work correctly if you use an IP address instead of a domain name.

Software Dependencies

Indexor Core is a generic library I built to enable the core features to be abstracted for use in bots for other messaging services.

speratus / indexor-discord-bot