Beta Release for Public Testing

[Don-Swanson]

Hello All!

I know there are many great Ideas and (unfortunately) some bugs that have been lying dormant for a little bit now.
While we give Ben a much needed break, I've done some refactoring, updating, bug squashing, and new feature implementation.

Some of the most notable changes are:

• Migration from Python Requests to httpx. This comes with significant speed improvements and other features useful for the long term stability of the project
• Added support for the long requested parsable JSON results
• Fixed (hopefully) some bugs with alt links
• Refactored, updated, and fixed a number of outstanding security issues

Since I'm only one person, I'm only able to test what I can, so looking for feedback from community tests to make sure all these changes didn't actually break something in the process that I may have forgotten to test. Please test and provide your feedback!

Full Release notes below:

Whoogle Search — Beta Release (since v0.9.4)

• Version base: v0.9.4 → beta (be83605)
• Changes: 30 files, +1074/−220
• Full Changelog: v0.9.4...beta

Highlights

• HTTPX migration with optional HTTP/2 (toggle via WHOOGLE_HTTP2)
• JSON search output: ?format=json or Accept: application/json
• Optional static bundling: WHOOGLE_BUNDLE_STATIC=1 serves bundle.css/bundle.js
• Tor/proxy refactor and availability detection
• Global autocomplete toggle via WHOOGLE_AUTOCOMPLETE

What’s Changed

• be83605 Update deps; context-managed file I/O; BeautifulSoup string usage (Don-Swanson)
• ffdeeb5 Autocomplete env toggle; HTTP client reconnection; link extraction fix (Don-Swanson)
• 99c7c7b Config context fixes; tests updated; search fallback handling (Don-Swanson)
• 7f80eb1 feat(beta): httpx, Tor/proxy refactor, JSON results, optional bundling, HTTP/2 toggle, cleanup (Don-Swanson)
• 418d9df Merge dependabot: jinja2-3.1.6
• 3733d87 Merge dependabot: cryptography-45.0.7

New Environment Variables

Name	Default	Description
WHOOGLE_HTTP2	1	Enable HTTP/2 for upstream httpx requests. Set 0 for HTTP/1.1.
WHOOGLE_BUNDLE_STATIC	0	Serve bundled CSS/JS (bundle.css, bundle.js) with cache-busting.
WHOOGLE_AUTOCOMPLETE	1	Toggle autocomplete/search suggestions globally.

Potentially Breaking Changes

• Upstream client switched to httpx; behavior differences from requests possible. If issues arise, set WHOOGLE_HTTP2=0.

Endpoint and Behavior Notes

• JSON results via /{search}?q=...&format=json or header Accept: application/json.
  • Returns 503 JSON when CAPTCHA-like content is detected.
  • Returns 303 for invalid queries, honoring JSON Accept.
• Bundled css assets are auto-included by templates when WHOOGLE_BUNDLE_STATIC=1.

Dependency Changes

• Added: httpx[http2,socks]==0.28.1, httpcore>=1.0.9, h11>=0.16.0, cachetools==6.2.0
• Removed: requests, urllib3, PySocks (replaced by httpx stack)
• Upgraded (highlights): cryptography (→ 46.0.1 non-armv7l), Jinja2 (→ 3.1.6), MarkupSafe (→ 3.0.2), beautifulsoup4 (→ 4.13.5), cssutils (→ 2.11.1), idna (→ 3.10), pluggy (→ 1.6.0), pycodestyle (→ 2.14.0), pyOpenSSL (→ 25.3.0 non-armv7l), soupsieve (→ 2.8), validators (→ 0.35.0), waitress (→ 3.0.2), wcwidth (→ 0.2.14), python-dotenv (→ 1.1.1), certifi (→ 2025.8.3), cffi (→ 2.0.0), click (→ 8.3.0), more-itertools (→ 10.8.0), packaging (→ 25.0), pyparsing (→ 3.2.5)
• Compatibility: cryptography==3.3.2 retained for armv7l (for now)

Upgrade Tips

• Force HTTP/1.1 if needed: set WHOOGLE_HTTP2=0
• Enable css bundling: set WHOOGLE_BUNDLE_STATIC=1 and restart
• Disable suggestions: set WHOOGLE_AUTOCOMPLETE=0

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This discussion was created from the release Beta Release for Public Testing.