So I struggled as a minorly techy person to get Searxng to work on my Mac OS (intel) Mac Sequoia 15.4. I set it up on localhost. Not perfect but good enough for my purposes.

I had to delete Caddy from the docker-compose file, which I don't know makes a difference.

Anyway, Got it all set up, the search works, got up the settings, and then I tried to set the default search engine in Firefox and it has his behavior:

1. Can't find the page if the .env is set to default. --> I set the address like this, then: SEARXNG_HOSTNAME= 127.0.0.1:8080
2. This causes an error: it tries to find https:// SEARXNG_HOSTNAME= 127.0.0.1:8080 and then declares there is no certificate.
3. "Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to 127.0.0.1:8080. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR

Error code: PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem."

Learn more…
4. Fine. Set it like this: SEARXNG_HOSTNAME= http://127.0.0.1:8080 This causes an error. it tries to find: https://http//127.0.0.1:8080 which results in a not found. (It's missing the colon, and I tried quotes, which did nothing).

I couldn't find how I could do an escape character or something.

I did search for several hours with no results.

So umm... how do I fix it? Thanks.

tldr;: trying to set up the default firefox browser to be SEARXNG, but the http:// is getting in the way. Am I missing an escape character?