Local Deep Research: Run Your Own AI Research Assistant, Fully Private

If you have ever wished you could throw a complex question at an AI and get back a proper cited report — not a hallucinated paragraph, but something that actually searched the web, read papers, and synthesized sources — that is what Local Deep Research (LDR) does. And it runs entirely on your machine.

The project sits at about 4,000 GitHub stars at the time of writing, has 124 releases, and is actively maintained. It is worth understanding what it actually does before you decide whether to spin it up.

What Is It?

Local Deep Research is a self-hosted AI research assistant. You give it a question. It searches across multiple sources — web, arXiv, PubMed, Wikipedia, GitHub, your own local documents — iterates on what it finds, and produces a structured report with citations.

It supports both local models (via Ollama) and cloud models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google). The "local" in the name means your data never has to leave your machine if you choose the fully-local setup.

Benchmark-wise, the project claims roughly 95% accuracy on the SimpleQA benchmark when tested with GPT-4.1-mini and SearXNG. That puts it in the range of commercial deep research tools.

Who This Is For

This tool is genuinely useful if you fall into one of these categories:

• You do research-heavy work (technical writing, literature reviews, competitive analysis) and are tired of manually stitching together sources.
• You want to search across your own document library with AI — think internal wikis, PDFs, notes.
• You work with sensitive topics and cannot send queries to a third-party API.
• You want to build a compounding knowledge base over time where each research session adds to a searchable library.

If you just want quick answers and are fine with ChatGPT, LDR is probably overkill. But if you want something you own and control, it is a serious option.

How It Works

The core loop is straightforward:

1. You submit a research question.
2. LDR picks a research strategy (quick summary, deep analysis, academic, etc.) and breaks the question into sub-queries.
3. It searches across configured sources, pulling results from the web, academic databases, or your local documents.
4. It synthesizes the results iteratively, discarding low-quality content and expanding on promising threads.
5. It produces a final report with citations and optionally stores sources in your encrypted local library.

Each session can download sources (arXiv papers, web pages, PubMed articles) directly into your library, which gets indexed and made searchable. Over time your knowledge base grows and future research queries can search across both live web results and everything you have already collected.

Getting Started

Option 1: Docker (Recommended for most people)

This is the fastest path. It handles dependencies, encryption, and all service wiring automatically.

Standard setup (CPU, works on Mac, Windows, Linux):

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LearningCircuit/local-deep-research/main/docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d

Wait about 30 seconds, then open http://localhost:5000.

With NVIDIA GPU acceleration (Linux only):

First install the NVIDIA Container Toolkit:

curl -fsSL https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/gpgkey | sudo gpg --dearmor \
  -o /usr/share/keyrings/nvidia-container-toolkit-keyring.gpg

curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/stable/deb/nvidia-container-toolkit.list | \
  sed 's#deb https://#deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/nvidia-container-toolkit-keyring.gpg] https://#g' | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nvidia-container-toolkit.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install nvidia-container-toolkit -y
sudo systemctl restart docker
nvidia-smi  # verify it worked

Then bring up the stack with GPU support:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LearningCircuit/local-deep-research/main/docker-compose.yml
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LearningCircuit/local-deep-research/main/docker-compose.gpu.override.yml
docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.gpu.override.yml up -d

The Docker Compose setup bundles Ollama (local LLM runner) and SearXNG (self-hosted meta-search engine) together with LDR. Everything runs locally.

Option 2: pip (For developers / Python integration)

If you want to embed LDR in a Python project or prefer to manage dependencies yourself:

# Install the package
pip install local-deep-research

# Run SearXNG in Docker for search
docker run -d -p 8080:8080 --name searxng searxng/searxng

# Install Ollama from https://ollama.ai, then pull a model
ollama pull gemma3:12b

# Start the web UI
python -m local_deep_research.web.app

Important note on encryption: The pip install does not automatically set up SQLCipher (the AES-256 encrypted database LDR uses for storing your data and API keys). If you hit errors during setup, bypass it for now with:

export LDR_ALLOW_UNENCRYPTED=true

This stores data in plain SQLite. Fine for local dev, not recommended for production or shared setups. Docker handles encryption out of the box.

Using the Python API

Once running, you can drive LDR programmatically:

from local_deep_research.api import LDRClient, quick_query

# One-liner research
summary = quick_query("username", "password", "What is the current state of Rust async runtimes?")
print(summary)

# Client for more control
client = LDRClient()
client.login("username", "password")
result = client.quick_research("Compare FAISS vs Hnswlib for vector search at scale")
print(result["summary"])

Using the HTTP API

LDR exposes a REST API with session-based authentication and CSRF protection. The auth flow is a bit verbose but works reliably:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

session = requests.Session()

# Get CSRF token from login page
login_page = session.get("http://localhost:5000/auth/login")
soup = BeautifulSoup(login_page.text, "html.parser")
csrf = soup.find("input", {"name": "csrf_token"}).get("value")

# Authenticate
session.post("http://localhost:5000/auth/login", data={
    "username": "user",
    "password": "pass",
    "csrf_token": csrf
})

# Get API CSRF token
api_csrf = session.get("http://localhost:5000/auth/csrf-token").json()["csrf_token"]

# Submit a research query
response = session.post(
    "http://localhost:5000/api/start_research",
    json={"query": "What are the tradeoffs between gRPC and REST for internal microservices?"},
    headers={"X-CSRF-Token": api_csrf}
)
print(response.json())

The repository includes ready-to-run HTTP examples under examples/api_usage/http/ that handle authentication, retry logic, and progress polling.

Enterprise / RAG Integration

If you already have a vector store or internal knowledge base, LDR can search it as one of its sources via LangChain retrievers:

from local_deep_research.api import quick_summary

result = quick_summary(
    query="What are our current deployment procedures for the payments service?",
    retrievers={"internal_kb": your_langchain_retriever},
    search_tool="internal_kb"
)

It supports FAISS, Chroma, Pinecone, Weaviate, Elasticsearch, and anything LangChain-compatible. This is where the tool gets interesting for teams — you can combine live web search with your own internal documents in a single research pass.

Search Sources Available

Free (no API key needed):

• arXiv, PubMed, Semantic Scholar (academic)
• Wikipedia, SearXNG (general web)
• GitHub (technical)
• The Guardian, Wikinews (news)
• Wayback Machine (historical)

Premium (API key required):

• Tavily (AI-optimized search)
• Google (via SerpAPI or Programmable Search Engine)
• Brave Search

Custom:

• Your local documents
• Any LangChain-compatible retriever

Supported LLMs

Local via Ollama: Llama 3, Mistral, Gemma, DeepSeek, and anything Ollama supports. No API costs, processing stays on your machine. Search queries will still hit the web if you are using web search engines.

Cloud: OpenAI (GPT-4, GPT-4.1-mini), Anthropic (Claude 3), Google (Gemini), and 100+ models via OpenRouter.

The README benchmarks show GPT-4.1-mini + SearXNG hitting 90-95% on SimpleQA. Gemini 2.0 Flash reached 82% in a single test run. Results vary by query type and configuration.

Security Model

For a self-hosted tool that holds API keys and research data, the security story matters.

Each user gets an isolated SQLCipher database encrypted with AES-256. The project uses a zero-knowledge design — there is no password recovery mechanism, which means even server admins cannot read user data. Docker images are signed with Cosign and include SLSA provenance attestations. The CI pipeline runs CodeQL, Semgrep, OWASP ZAP, Trivy, Gitleaks, and OSV-Scanner on every release.

If you are running this fully locally with Ollama and SearXNG, nothing leaves your machine.

Is It Worth Trying?

Yes, if:

• You regularly do research that requires synthesizing multiple sources.
• You need to search across private documents alongside the web.
• Privacy matters — you cannot send queries to commercial APIs.
• You want to build up a searchable knowledge base over time.
• You are building a research-augmented application and want a local-first backend.

Maybe not, if:

• You need simple Q&A. This is heavyweight for that.
• You are on limited hardware. Running a local LLM plus SearXNG plus the app itself adds up. A GPU helps significantly.
• You want a zero-config experience. The Docker path is smooth, but getting the full setup — GPU passthrough, encryption, custom models — takes some tinkering.

The SQLCipher setup is the roughest edge. Docker sidesteps it cleanly, but the pip path has caught people out. The project documents it well, but plan for some back-and-forth if you go that route.

Quick Reference

Further Reading

• Installation Wiki