How to install the YaCy web search engine

This is how I got it working:

  1. Go to this web page: https://yacy.net/
  2. On the upper side of your screen you can see "Download" and from there download the "YaCy for GNU/Linux"
  3. After you download the archive extract it to your preferred location open the extracted folder "yacy" now here you can see "./startYACY.sh" file the easiest way to run this is just to open terminal and drag and drop this file into it and press enter. It will tell you that "YaCy started as daemon process. Administration" and an HTTP address just copy the address and paste it into the web browser
  4. And one more thing for this search engine to run you will need java, you can find it in the software center I installed "OpenJDK Java 7 Runtime" but as far as I can know it will run on 6 as well.

All this can be done by running in a terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt-get install -y openjdk-8-jre-headless
wget http://latest.yacy.net/yacy_v1.922_20191013_9964.tar.gz
tar xfz yacy_v1.922_20191013_9964.tar.gz
cd yacy
./startYACY.sh

Then open http://localhost:8090 in your web-browser.

Good luck


There is now a Debian/Ubuntu repository available. In Synaptic Package Manager, add the following apt-line (repository link):

deb http://debian.yacy.net ./

Register the YaCy repository key:

sudo apt-key advanced --keyserver pgp.net.nz --recv-keys 03D886E7

Update your repositories and install:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre-headless #only a headless version is needed
sudo apt-get install yacy

YaCy should now be available at http://localhost:8090 - it will ask you to configure some settings there.

You only need to set an admin password if you want access to admin configuration from remote machines, or local password protection. Otherwise admin configuration is only accessible from localhost (without a password).

(Note that YaCy will now be running in the background all the time.)

You will automatically receive updates when they are made to the repository, just like other Ubuntu updates.

Reference: http://www.yacy-websuche.de/wiki/index.php/En:DebianInstall