Note: Zinc and all its APIs are considered to be alpha stage at this time. Expect breaking changes in API contracts and data format at this stage. That being said let that not stop you from trying out Zinc as it works fantastically well and there are many users using Zinc regularly.

Zinc Search Engine

Zinc is a search engine that does full text indexing. It is a lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch and runs using a fraction of the resources. It uses bluge as the underlying indexing library.

It is very simple and easy to operate as opposed to Elasticsearch which requires a couple dozen knobs to understand and tune which you can get up and running in 2 minutes

It is a drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch if you are just ingesting data using APIs and searching using kibana (Kibana is not supported with zinc. Zinc provides its own UI).

Check the below video for a quick demo of Zinc.

Playground Server

You could try ZincSearch without installing using below details:

Server	https://playground.dev.zincsearch.com
User ID	admin
Password	Complexpass#123

Note: Do not store sensitive data on this server as its available to everyone on internet. Data will also be cleaned on this server regularly.

Join slack channel

Why zinc

While Elasticsearch is a very good product, it is complex and requires lots of resources and is more than a decade old. I built Zinc so it becomes easier for folks to use full text search indexing without doing a lot of work.

Features:

1. Provides full text indexing capability
2. Single binary for installation and running. Binaries available under releases for multiple platforms.
3. Web UI for querying data written in Vue
4. Compatibility with Elasticsearch APIs for ingestion of data (single record and bulk API)
5. Out of the box authentication
6. Schema less - No need to define schema upfront and different documents in the same index can have different fields.
7. Index storage in s3 and minio (experimental)
8. aggregation support

Roadmap items:

1. High Availability
2. Distributed reads and writes
3. Geosptial search
4. Raise an issue if you are looking for something.

Screenshots

Search screen

User management screen

Getting started

Download / Installation / Run

Check installation installation docs

Data ingestion

Single record

Check single record ingestion docs

Bulk ingestion

Check bulk ingestion docs

Fluent bit

Check fluet-bit ingestion docs

Syslog-ng

Check syslog-ng ingestion docs

API Reference

Check Zinc API docs

How to develop and contribute to Zinc

Check the contributing guide

Who uses Zinc (Known users)?

1. Quadrantsec

Please do raise a PR adding your details if you are using Zinc.