Self-Hosting Typesense — My Experience and Lessons Learned

Photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash

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!

Would I Self-Host Again?

Would I do it again? Absolutely, but only if I needed full control. For small projects, managed Typesense is much easier.

Want help setting up Typesense? Hit me up!