Did you accidently typo the url? I see a ‘/’ instead of a ‘:’ before the port number.

try going to mydomainname:20054

Might also need to fix the searchx_base_url env variable

I’ve never used portainer sorry.

If you see the published port for a very short time then something might be crashing when it tries to start.

docker logs searxng from cli might be revealing

edit: I do have a searxng container and my compose.yml is very similar to yours. I guess we both copied the example. The only difference I can see is that you still have the env variables for UWSGI_WORKERS and UWSGI_THREADS. I just set both of those to 4 instead of using the SEARXNG_ env vars

Listen on [::]:8080

[uWSGI] getting INI configuration from /etc/searxng/uwsgi.ini

open("/etc/searxng/uwsgi.ini"): Permission denied [core/io.c line 525]

SearXNG version 2025.5.16+1b08324

Use existing /etc/searxng/uwsgi.ini

Use existing /etc/searxng/settings.yml

Listen on [::]:8080

[uWSGI] getting INI configuration from /etc/searxng/uwsgi.ini

open("/etc/searxng/uwsgi.ini"): Permission denied [core/io.c line 525]

SearXNG version 2025.5.16+1b08324

Use existing /etc/searxng/uwsgi.ini

Use existing /etc/searxng/settings.yml

Listen on [::]:8080

[uWSGI] getting INI configuration from /etc/searxng/uwsgi.ini

open("/etc/searxng/uwsgi.ini"): Permission denied [core/io.c line 525]

~ # ls /etc/searxng
settings.yml  uwsgi.ini
~ # cat settings.yml
cat: can't open 'settings.yml': No such file or directory
~ # cat /etc/searxng/settings.yml
general:
  # Debug mode, only for development. Is overwritten by ${SEARXNG_DEBUG}
  debug: false
  # displayed name
  instance_name: "searxng"
  # For example: https://example.com/privacy

SN_FR_@SN:~$ sudo docker exec -it searxng sh -c "id"
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

.

You kind of need caddy to act as a reverse proxy for that. Or are you using a different reverse proxy?

Here is my searxng rocker compose:

services:
  redis:
    container_name: redis
    image: docker.io/valkey/valkey:7-alpine
    command: valkey-server --save 30 1 --loglevel warning
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - local_bridge
    volumes:
      - ./data/reddis:/data
    cap_drop:
      - ALL
    cap_add:
      - SETGID
      - SETUID
      - DAC_OVERRIDE
    logging:
      driver: "json-file"
      options:
        max-size: "1m"
        max-file: "1"

  searxng:
    container_name: searxng
    image: docker.io/searxng/searxng:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - local_bridge
      - proxy
    volumes:
      - ./data/searxng:/etc/searxng
    environment:
      - SEARXNG_BASE_URL=https://${SEARXNG_HOSTNAME:-localhost}/
      - SEARXNG_SECRET=${SEARXNG_SECRET}
    cap_drop:
      - ALL
    cap_add:
      - CHOWN
      - SETGID
      - SETUID

Glad to see you got it working. One thing to add that you might find useful:

it shows 20054:8080 for a very short period when I start the stack and then disappeared

This is an indication that the container has stopped. Because you have restart: unless-stopped set, the container is stuck in a bootloop so portainer will always show a state of either starting or running. Docker container automatically stop when the application inside the container has exited or completed… Often because the application has encountered an error.

Some more information that may or may not be useful:

A good example of a container stopped because the application has finished is the Cross-seed container that people use to cross reference their torrents seeding in their bittorrent client with torrents available on other torrent trackers. In this case, the application runs a search on each tracker, downloads the files and once the search is done the application exits and then the docker container will stop.

have you checked the directory & file permissions with ls -la /Your/SearXNG/WorkingDir ?

The error in your log is telling you that the container does not have permission to that directory/file, you can essentially bypass this with sudo chmod 777 /Your/SearXNG/WorkingDir/* and sudo chown 1000:1000 /Your/SearXNG/WorkingDir/*

However, if you’re looking for security best practices this is not advisable but if all you care about is that it works it should be fine.

~ # ls -la /etc/searxng
total 72
drwx------    1 1026     100             42 May 17 04:49 .
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           494 May 17 05:24 ..
----------    1 root     root         68667 May 17 04:49 settings.yml
----------    1 root     root          1223 May 17 04:49 uwsgi.ini

volumes: 
- /volume1/SN/Docker/searxng-stack/searxng:/etc/searxng:rw

volumes:
- /home/YourUser/docker/config/searxng:/etc/searxng:rw

Question: What is redis and valkey giving you in this instance? I took a look at my notes and I’ve never invoked redis. Just curious. School me. This is what I spin up: