Fess Codelibs Fess API

Name: Fess API
Brand: Fess API
Availability: InStock

✓ Official Vendor SpecDeveloper ToolsMonitoring ObservabilityapiKey19 EndpointsREST

For Agents

Run full-text and faceted searches against a self-hosted Fess enterprise search index, manage labels and favourites, and trigger crawler runs via 19 REST endpoints.

Install Jentic One Beta

Connect the Fess API to your agent

Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the Fess API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.

Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.

Step 1: Jentic One Host machine

# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh

Step 2: Agent machine

# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh
jentic register       # connects your agent to your Jentic One instance

Jentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.

Capabilities

What an agent can do with Fess API.

Run full-text searches with faceting and pagination across crawled documents

Get autocomplete suggestions for partially typed queries

List popular search terms aggregated by Fess analytics

Mark and unmark documents as user favourites

GET STARTED

Start building with Fess API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

Use Cases

Patterns agents use Fess API for, with concrete tasks.

★ Internal Knowledge Base Search

Power a chat-based internal knowledge base by routing employee queries to the Fess search endpoint and returning ranked document snippets. Fess supports both GET and POST search variants so longer query bodies can carry filter expressions. Typical deployments index Confluence, file shares, and wikis; query latency is under 100ms for indexes up to a few million documents.

POST /api/v1/search with the user's query and a label filter, then return the top 5 hits with title and snippet

Search Analytics and Trending Topics

Surface trending search topics inside an organisation by polling /api/v1/popular-words and grouping by time window. This identifies emerging information needs that documentation teams should address. Fess records popular words automatically as part of its analytics pipeline.

GET /api/v1/popular-words and return the 10 most frequent terms, then create a Slack message summarising them

Crawler Operations

Trigger crawler runs and inspect cluster health programmatically so an agent can refresh the index after upstream content changes without manual admin console use. Fess exposes /api/admin/crawler/start and /api/v1/health for these operations behind the same API token.

POST /api/admin/crawler/start, then poll GET /api/v1/health every 30 seconds until status returns OK

AI Agent Document Retrieval via Jentic

Through Jentic, an agent can run grounded retrieval against a Fess index without writing a custom HTTP client. The agent searches Jentic for 'search documents', loads the Fess endpoint schema, and executes queries with the user's natural-language input. This unlocks RAG-style answers grounded in self-hosted enterprise content.

Search Jentic for 'search enterprise documents', load Fess /api/v1/search, and return the top 3 hits to feed into a Claude prompt

Key Endpoints

19 endpoints — fess is an open-source enterprise search server, and its rest api exposes search, suggest, label management, popular words, favourites, health checks, and admin operations across 19 endpoints.

METHOD

PATH

DESCRIPTION

GET

/api/v1/search

Search documents

POST

/api/v1/search

Search documents with body

GET

/api/v1/suggest

Get autocomplete suggestions

GET

/api/v1/popular-words

List popular search words

GET

/api/v1/health

Get cluster health

POST

/api/admin/crawler/start

Start crawler

GET

/api/v1/search

Search documents

POST

/api/v1/search

Search documents with body

GET

/api/v1/suggest

Get autocomplete suggestions

GET

/api/v1/popular-words

List popular search words

GET

/api/v1/health

Get cluster health

POST

Why Jentic?

Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.

Credential isolation

Your Fess token and host URL are stored once, encrypted, by your own Jentic One instance and injected at execution time. The raw Authorization header value never enters the agent's prompt, logs, or context.

Intent-based discovery

Agents search Jentic by intent such as 'search enterprise documents' or 'get search suggestions', and Jentic returns the matching Fess operation with its input schema, so the agent calls it directly without reading the admin docs.

Time to first call

FAQs

Specific to using Fess API through Jentic.

What authentication does the Fess API use?

Fess uses an API token sent in the Authorization header. Because Fess is self-hosted, the {host} part of the base URL is set per deployment. Through Jentic the token is encrypted in your Jentic One instance.

Can I run faceted search through the Fess API?

Yes. Both GET /api/v1/search and POST /api/v1/search accept filter parameters and label-based facets. Use POST when query bodies grow beyond URL length limits.

What are the rate limits for the Fess API?

Fess does not enforce server-side rate limits in the OpenAPI spec because it is self-hosted. Throughput depends on the deployment's hardware and JVM configuration.

How do I trigger the Fess crawler through Jentic?

Search Jentic for 'start search crawler', load the POST /api/admin/crawler/start schema, and execute. Run pip install jentic to get started.

Does Fess support autocomplete?

Yes. The GET /api/v1/suggest endpoint returns suggestion candidates for partial queries, suitable for type-ahead UIs and agent query refinement.

Can I check Fess cluster health programmatically?

Yes. GET /api/v1/health returns cluster status, useful for readiness probes and post-crawl verification before running queries.

Can I limit what my agent is allowed to do with the Fess API?

Yes. Because Jentic One is self-hosted, you decide which Fess operations your agent may call, so you can allow read operations like GET /api/v1/search, GET /api/v1/suggest, and GET /api/v1/popular-words while leaving admin routes such as POST /api/admin/crawler/start out entirely. Search targets travel in the request body or query rather than as owned-resource path ids, so scoping is done at the operation level you choose. Your Fess token and host URL are stored and injected by your own instance, and an admin action runs only if you explicitly include that operation.

Fess Codelibs Fess API

Connect the Fess API to your agent

Capabilities

Start building with Fess API

Use Cases

Key Endpoints

Why Jentic?

Related APIs

FAQs