Maintenance#

Searpa needs little ongoing care, but a few management commands keep it tidy and current. Run them on a schedule (a cron job, a systemd timer, or your orchestrator’s scheduled-task feature). Run each inside the container (docker exec <container> python manage.py …) or via make / uv run from source.

Scheduled tasks#

Command	What it does	Suggested schedule
`clear_expired_cache`	Deletes expired search-result cache rows	Daily
`check_provider_health`	Probes providers with a free health endpoint so `/status` stays current, without spending paid quota	Every ~10 minutes
`refresh_currency`	Refreshes cached exchange rates and prunes the instant-answer cache	Daily (optional, also self-refreshes on demand)

A cron example:

# Daily 03:00: drop expired cache entries
0 3 * * *  cd /app && python manage.py clear_expired_cache

# Every 10 minutes: keep the /status page current
*/10 * * * *  cd /app && python manage.py check_provider_health

The make equivalents from source are make refresh-currency and the underlying manage.py commands above.

One-off / occasional tasks#

Bang definitions#

The bangs database (the thousands of !shortcuts) is downloaded from Kagi’s open-source bangs repository with:

python manage.py fetch_bangs        # or: make bangs

Run it once at setup, and again occasionally to pick up new bang definitions. If the bang data is missing, bangs simply fall back to being treated as ordinary query text.

Database migrations#

The container applies migrations automatically on every start, so a normal upgrade is just pulling a newer image and restarting. To run them by hand:

python manage.py migrate

Upgrading#

Pull the new image (or rebuild from the latest source).
Restart the container, migrations run automatically on boot.
If the release notes mention new bang data or providers, run fetch_bangs and review any new configuration variables.

Because the app is stateless apart from PostgreSQL, a rolling restart is safe; keep your database backed up as usual.

Caching#

Search results are cached briefly on the server (about an hour) to stay fast and ease load on providers; the cache is keyed to the query, not to any user. clear_expired_cache removes stale entries so the table doesn’t grow unbounded.