Multi-user AI search and synthesis. A fork of Vane by overlabbed.
Windrose takes Vane — the open-source, privacy-focused AI answering engine — and extends it into a multi-user system. Where Vane is designed for a single operator on their own hardware, Windrose is built for small teams, households, and self-hosted deployments where more than one person needs their own account, their own history, and their own settings, all served from the same instance.
A windrose is the figure on a nautical chart showing the directions and frequencies of winds converging on a location. The name felt right for a tool where multiple users each point their own questions at the same shared engine and get their own answers back.
- Per-user accounts with authentication (initial target: local credentials + OIDC)
- Per-user search history, settings, and provider keys — scoped and isolated
- Role model distinguishing administrators from regular users
- Shared vs. private resources — admins can configure provider pools and source policies that apply across all users
- Admin surface for user management, quota/usage visibility, and instance-wide settings
Everything Vane does today — SearxNG integration, Ollama + cloud LLM support, multiple search modes, cited answers, file uploads, widgets — Windrose continues to do. The goal is to be a strict superset that tracks upstream closely.
Windrose is in early development. Expect rough edges, breaking changes, and schema migrations until the 0.1 release. If you need a rock-solid single-user deployment today, run upstream Vane directly.
Installation instructions will land here once the first tagged release is cut. For now, treat this as a development fork.
Windrose is an MIT-licensed fork, not a replacement or a criticism. Vane is excellent for its intended use case, and we intend to stay close to upstream — pulling in releases, contributing back fixes that aren't multi-user-specific, and keeping our architectural divergence documented and minimal. See FORK.md for the full rationale and divergence plan.
Contributions welcome. Before opening a large PR, please read FORK.md so you understand what belongs in Windrose vs. what should go upstream to Vane. Bug reports and issues that apply to both projects are generally better filed upstream first.
MIT — see LICENSE. Original Vane copyright © 2026 ItzCrazyKns is preserved; Windrose-specific modifications © 2026 overlabbed.