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1+==================================
2+Limit access to your searx engines
3+==================================
4+
5+Administrators might find themselves wanting to limit access to some of the
6+enabled engines on their instances. It might be because they do not want to
7+expose some private information through an offline engine. Or they
8+would rather share engines only with their trusted friends or colleagues.
9+
10+Private engines
11+===============
12+
13+To solve this issue private engines were introduced in :pull:`1823`.
14+A new option was added to engines named `tokens`. It expects a list
15+of strings. If the user making a request presents one of the tokens
16+of an engine, he/she is able to access information about the engine
17+and make search requests.
18+
19+Example configuration to restrict access to the Arch Linux Wiki engine:
20+
21+.. code:: yaml
22+
23+ - name : arch linux wiki
24+ engine : archlinux
25+ shortcut : al
26+ tokens : [ 'my-secret-token' ]
27+
28+
29+Unless a user has configured the right token, the engine is going
30+to be hidden from him/her. It is not going to be included in the
31+list of engines on the Preferences page and in the output of
32+`/config` REST API call.
33+
34+Tokens can be added to one's configuration on the Preferences page
35+under "Engine tokens". The input expects a comma separated list of
36+strings.
37+
38+The distribution of the tokens from the administrator to the users
39+is not carved in stone. As providing access to such engines
40+implies that the admin knows and trusts the user, we do not see
41+necessary to come up with a strict process. Instead,
42+we would like to add guidelines to the documentation of the feature.
43+
44+Next steps
45+==========
46+
47+Now that searx has support for both offline engines and private engines,
48+it is possible to add concrete engines which benefit from these features.
49+For example engines which search on the local host running the instance.
50+Be it searching your file system or querying a private database. Be creative
51+and come up with new solutions which fit your use case.
52+
53+Acknowledgement
54+===============
55+
56+This development was sponsored by `Search and Discovery Fund`_ of `NLnet Foundation`_ .
57+
58+.. _Search and Discovery Fund: https://nlnet.nl/discovery
59+.. _NLnet Foundation: https://nlnet.nl/
60+
61+
62+| Happy hacking.
63+| kvch // 2020.02.28 22:26