Some thoughts on Perplexica

[delfireinoso]

Perplexica is the best project I've found using local models. It's useful as a casual user and as a researcher. I think there is a lot of room to improve. And there are my thoughts

• Perplexica was designed for local use. But many people want to use it outside the computer where it runs. It's possible to configure to run on the local network without a lot of hassle. But the code needs to be rewritten to make possible to run Perplexica from my phone. And in the future by a team. I've shared academic searches with my co-workers and they are thrilled.

• To easy the experience some settings should be kept in a config file and save it on the Docker volume and this one should be kept on upgrades. (done on Perplexica 1.70)

• The upgrades should be less painful. Last one had a little error that could be patched by some users. Perplexica needs a Docker container install. (partially done on Perplexica 1.70 without need to delete old versions of Perplexica on Docker)

• searxng should be outside as it has other uses and it's updated separately.

• With persistent settings, you could save the chats (done in Perplexica 1.70)

• Now as we have archived chats, we need to delete those than we don't need anymore (done in Perplexica 1.71)

• And we could think on multiple users, in the LAN first, and perhaps in the future out of the LAN.

• My impossibility to expose Perplexica out of home makes impossible to contribute why the UI fails in some aspects on iPhones and iPads (the friend who is an expert in Apple UI has not a computer to run Perplexica). The copy to clipboard problem on iOS and iPadOS is one. The impossibility to manage settings on an iPhone makes it unusable on those devices by the moment, but the iPad is not affected and my wife could use it.

• I have been able to get results on other languages, some models are friendly, but there is need to be a Language setting, and a translation of the Frontend to other languages.

I understand that this is a long list. And I'm glad to see that many things are now working and confident to see more things to come. Perplexica is better than the free Perplexity, and saving the dialogues it would be a way to surpass the paid version, and I love the privacy of my own installation.

[ds-sebastian]

I agree that docker variables or a mounted config file should be used for all the settings instead of the config.toml that's only used for building. This allows for ease of use with a single container for UI + Backend (SearXNG separate container). If this happens, I'd be happy to get this on unRAID Community Apps store!

I attempted to make a simple combined docker image, trying to write the config.toml using variables. The image works on my macbook but not my unRAID linux server.

[delfireinoso]

Solved the network problems with the last build and the ui/components/theme/Switcher.tsx patch.

I use zrok.io, and for this project I have set it up on a docker install, so I don't need to start a terminal to get an external access trough SSH.

Now the first things I think should be addressed:

On iOs there is not access to settings so I'dont have the oportunity to change the settings and set up the correct models. I'll see on android devices. On iPadOs there is some problem, but I see the settings

The program should use a mounted config file so settings would be there without changing nothing above.

With a mounted Volume to have more than an user profile and to save the chats would be easy.

[delfireinoso]

I've updated the first post as some things are included on Perplexica 1.70 and the work has to be credited

[overcuriousity]

bump this

Perplexica is great, and i managed to configure it on my proxmox host with separate instances for searxng, ollama and perplexica, exposing it inside the LAN (could be made externally, but there is no proper access control) via a network-wide Proxyserver and multiple nginx proxies - it was running on my phone from there. But it was a real pain in the a**.
Then some misconfiguration happened and unfortunately now can´t reproduce it because of the mixed-up Websocket and HTTP endpoints. It should all concatenated into one HTTP endpoint, without websocket. The Open-Webui Project has a similar Architecture and managed to do this quite well.

[edmundronald]

Bravo for an install that is well documented and works well on Mac. Install is 90% of the difficulty for an average user ...