sist2
File system indexer and web-based search for local files
sist2 (Simple incremental search tool) is a lightning-fast file system indexer that scans directories and builds a searchable index of file contents and metadata. It provides a mobile-friendly web interface and supports either Elasticsearch or a lightweight SQLite (FTS5) search backend.
Key Features
- Incremental, multi-threaded scanning optimized for speed and low memory usage
- Web UI for searching and browsing results, including thumbnails and metadata
- Supports Elasticsearch indexing or a simpler SQLite-based search backend
- Content extraction and metadata parsing for many common formats (documents, media, ebooks)
- Recursive scanning inside archive files (including archives within archives)
- Optional OCR via Tesseract for images and supported ebook/document formats
- Manual tagging in the UI and automatic tagging via user scripts
- Basic statistics and disk utilization visualizations
Use Cases
- Personal or team “desktop search” for large document and media collections
- Building a searchable archive of mixed file types (PDFs, photos, videos, ebooks)
- Indexing NAS or server directories to quickly locate files by content or metadata
Limitations and Considerations
- Elasticsearch provides more features but has a significantly higher resource footprint than SQLite
- Archive scanning is single-threaded and some seek-heavy media formats in archives may be limited
sist2 is well-suited for users who want fast local file indexing with a modern web search experience and flexible backend options depending on resources and feature needs.
Categories:
Tags:
Tech Stack:
SQLite
JavaScript
Docker
Python
C
ElasticsearchSimilar Services
Meilisearch
Fast search engine API with full-text, vector, and hybrid search
Meilisearch is a lightning-fast search engine API for apps and websites, offering typo-tolerant full-text search plus vector and AI-ready hybrid retrieval.
ArchiveBox
Open-source self-hosted web archiving and snapshotting tool
Self-hosted tool to collect and preserve webpages, media, and bookmarks in durable formats (HTML, PDF, WARC, MP4) with a CLI, web UI, and search.
Typesense
Fast, typo-tolerant search engine with keyword and vector search
Typesense is a developer-friendly search engine for instant, typo-tolerant search-as-you-type with faceting, filtering, geo search, and vector/semantic search APIs.
SearXNG
Privacy-focused metasearch engine for aggregating web results
SearXNG is a privacy-respecting metasearch engine that aggregates results from many search services without tracking or profiling users.
ZincSearch
A lightweight open-source search engine for full-text indexing.
ZincSearch is a Go-based, lightweight search engine for full-text indexing with Elasticsearch API-compatible ingestion, a Vue UI, and a schema-less document model.
Onyx Community Edition
Self-hosted AI chat and enterprise search for any LLM
Open-source platform for AI chat, RAG, agents, and enterprise search across your team’s connected knowledge sources, compatible with hosted and local LLMs.
