Findling

Zero-config full text search for Nextcloud.

Findling makes the Nextcloud search find what is inside your documents, including scanned PDFs, without an Elasticsearch cluster and without a single required setting. Results appear in the regular unified search bar, next to files, contacts and calendar entries.

Status: Phase 1, walking skeleton, not usable yet. There is no indexing and no real search in this phase. This repository currently proves the integration path end to end and freezes the store identity. Do not install it on a production server.

The two app model

Findling ships as two store entries that belong together:

Part	App id	Store section	What it does
PHP companion	findling	Apps	Registers the search provider and proxies queries to the backend
Python ExApp	findling_backend	External Apps	Runs extraction, OCR and the search index inside a container

Both entries must be installed, and both always carry the same major and minor version. The companion is tiny on purpose: it owns the Nextcloud side, including the permission check, because Nextcloud cannot register a search provider from an external app. The container owns the heavy lifting.

Requirements

• Nextcloud 32 to 35 (min-version 32, max-version 35)
• The AppAPI app, with HaRP as the deploy target
• Target hardware: 4 to 8 GB RAM, ARM64 and AMD64, CPU only, no GPU required

The project is built for self hosters and small organisations on ordinary hardware, not for a search cluster.

Privacy

• No file content leaves the server. Extraction, OCR, indexing and search all run inside the container on your own machine.
• No telemetry. The app does not phone home, not even for version checks.
• User files are never modified. Every file access goes through a read only content gateway, and a checksum gate in CI proves the invariant on a reference corpus.
• Permissions are enforced by Nextcloud itself. The final result filter runs in PHP against the user folder, so the index never becomes a second permission model.

Repository layout

php/               PHP companion app, mapped to apps/findling in CI
backend/           Python ExApp, package under backend/src/findling/
testdata/corpus/   Reference corpus for the read only checksum gate
docs/              Process and operations documentation
.github/workflows/ CI: python, php, integration, docker

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.