YaCy Skill

YaCy Skill

Control and manage a local YaCy search engine instance.

Description

This skill provides an interface to interact with YaCy, the open-source distributed search engine, running on localhost. It allows you to start/stop the service, check status, and integrate search capabilities into your OpenClaw workflows.

Prerequisites

• Docker installed and running
• Ports 8090 and 8443 available on localhost

Installation

The YaCy container runs with persistent data stored in a Docker volume (yacy_search_server_data). To install:

docker run -d --name yacy_search_server -p 8090:8090 -p 8443:8443 -v yacy_search_server_data:/opt/yacy_search_server/DATA --restart unless-stopped --log-opt max-size=200m --log-opt max-file=2 yacy/yacy_search_server:latest

Access the web interface at: http://localhost:8090

Default credentials: admin / yacy (change after first login)

Capabilities

• Start YaCy container/daemon
• Stop YaCy container/daemon
• Check YaCy status
• Perform web searches (RSS API)
• Manage indexing (future)

Tools

This skill provides:

• yacy_start - Start the YaCy service
• yacy_stop - Stop the YaCy service
• yacy_status - Check if YaCy is running and view logs
• yacy_search - Perform a search query (replaces Brave search when configured as default)

Configuration

Set in OpenClaw config or via environment:

• yacy_dir - Path to YaCy installation (default: /home/q/.openclaw/workspace/yacy_search_server)
• port - HTTP port (default: 8090)

Replacing Brave Search

To make YaCy your default web search:

1. Install and start YaCy
2. Set OpenClaw config: tools.defaultSearch = "yacy_search"
3. Remove BRAVE_API_KEY environment variable if set

Now all "search for X" requests will use your local YaCy instance instead of Brave.

Notes

YaCy runs completely locally and can be used as a privacy-focused search solution. It also participates in the global YaCy peer-to-peer network by default, but this can be disabled in settings.

License

GPL 2.0+ (same as YaCy)

Created: 2026-02-11 Skill version: 0.1.0 Target OpenClaw: 2026.2.9+