Launching Vodou

From a source checkout, run:

python main.py

On Windows, you can create a shortcut to this command using the vodou.ico icon included in the repository. On Linux, running packaging/install-linux.sh once adds Vodou to your application menu.

Vodou's home page and default search point at a local, self-hosted SearXNG instance rather than a third-party search engine. For that private search (and the optional local AI features), start the companion Docker backend once before opening Vodou:

cd docker
cp .env.example .env
./setup.sh
docker compose up -d

You don't need Docker at all to use Vodou — you can simply type full web addresses into the address bar. Without the local search backend running, the home page and address-bar searches won't load until you either start it or point Vodou at a different search engine (see Start page, startup page & search engine).

If Vodou won't start on Linux

On a Wayland session, try launching with QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb python main.py.