Self-Hosting Typesense — My Experience and Lessons Learned

3 min readFeb 13, 2025

We needed a scalable, cost-effective search solution for our platforms, and I was tasked with self-hosting Typesense to power full-text search. While managed services offer ease of setup, they can quickly become expensive at scale.

After evaluating options, Typesense stood out

Typesense is an open-source, lightweight, and blazing-fast search engine, making it a great alternative.

However, self-hosting wasn’t as straightforward as expected. From networking issues between nodes to security group misconfigurations and load balancer struggles, this journey had many roadblocks.

One thing that helped me a lot was their official documentation: https://typesense.org/docs/guide/install-typesense.html#option-2-local-machine-self-hosting

In this blog, I’ll walk through the high-level setup, the issues I faced, and the solutions that finally made everything work.

Setting Up a 3-Node Typesense Cluster on AWS

To ensure high availability and fault tolerance, I deployed three EC2 instances in the same security group behind an AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB).

Step 1: Creating the EC2 Instances

I provisioned three Ubuntu EC2 instances with private IPs in the same VPC:

Node 1: 192.168.1.15
Node 2: 192.168.1.16
Node 3: 192.168.1.12

This setup ensures that if one node goes down, the cluster remains functional.

The First Big Issue: Nodes Couldn’t Communicate

Once I started Typesense on all three nodes, I realized the nodes weren’t talking to each other.

This was unexpected, and debugging took a while.

The Problem:

Each instance couldn’t reach the others on port 8107 (peering) and 8108 (API).
Security groups were too restrictive, blocking internal communication
Typesense was not correctly started to enable cluster communication.

The Fix:

I updated the AWS security group to allow inbound traffic from all internal nodes:

Custom TCP Rule | 8107-8108 | Source: 192.168.1.0/24

Now, all nodes could talk to each other.

Step 2: Installing Typesense on Each Node

After fixing the networking issues, I installed Typesense on all nodes:

curl -O https://dl.typesense.org/releases/0.25.0/typesense-server-0.25.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xvzf typesense-server-0.25.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz
mv typesense-server /usr/local/bin/typesense

Step 3: Configuring Cluster Communication

Each node needed to know about the other two nodes.
I created a nodes file on each instance:

echo '192.168.1.10:8107:8108,192.168.1.11:8107:8108,192.168.1.12:8107:8108' | sudo tee /etc/typesense/nodes

Step 4: Starting Typesense on Each Node

On each node, I ran:

typesense-server \
  --data-dir /var/lib/typesense \
  --api-key=my_secure_key \
  --api-address 0.0.0.0 \
  --api-port 8108 \
  --peering-address 192.168.1.X \
  --peering-port 8107 \
  --nodes=/etc/typesense/nodes

Now, all nodes were able to communicate and sync!

Enabling Auto-Restart

To ensure that Typesense automatically starts and restarts in case of failures, I set up a systemd service:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/typesense.service

Added this configuration:

[Unit]
Description=Typesense Server
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/typesense-server --data-dir /var/lib/typesense --api-key=my_secure_key --api-address 0.0.0.0 --api-port 8108 --peering-address 192.168.1.X --peering-port 8107 --nodes=/etc/typesense/nodes
Restart=always
User=root

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then ran:

sudo systemctl enable typesense
sudo systemctl start typesense

Now, Typesense restarts automatically if it crashes.

Deploying the Load Balancer

Step 5: Setting Up the AWS Load Balancer

I created an AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute search requests across all three nodes.

Second Big Issue: Load Balancer Not Forwarding Requests

I hit another issue requests to the ALB weren’t reaching the nodes.

The Problem:
1️ALB’s security group didn’t allow traffic on port 8108.
2️ Health check was failing because it was using the wrong port.

Fix:

Updated ALB security group to allow port 8108 from all sources.
Set Health Check Path to /health.

Now, requests started going through the load balancer!

Final Fix: Enabling HTTPS

Since Typesense was running on HTTP, I needed to add HTTPS.

The Problem:

Cloudflare doesn’t allow CNAME at root domains.
I needed SSL/TLS encryption end-to-end.

Fix:

Used AWS ACM to generate an SSL certificate for the ALB.
Configured Cloudflare to enable HTTPS.
set CNAME for www.search.infinitypaul.com.
Used A Record (Alias) for search.infinitypaul.com.

Now, all requests were encrypted!

After several networking issues, security group tweaks, and debugging, Typesense is now fully self-hosted and running!

Please use only Search Only API Keys If you intend to use this in your javascript application, Never expose your master API key in client-side code!