Why can't yacy search engine crawl localhost webserver?

Question

What I've tried: I installed the yacy search crawler / indexer / search engine on my laptop to play around & evaluate it for an IPFS project.

The install is easy enough, but it refuses to crawl & index the content of my local nginx webserver. Seems like an odd default configuration to prohibit that. I get this response:

Crawling of "http://localhost/" failed. Reason: denied_(the host 'localhost' is local, but local addresses are not accepted: 127.0.0.1)/

I've been looking but can't find any info on why this occurs or if there are any workarounds. Interestingly, the yacy forum search doesn't provide useful info on this either.

I didn't expect errors on such a small, local website, or what appears to be a prohibition of indexing a website on my own machine.

Answer 1

It is a bit confusing, and I chose the "Search portal for your own web pages" as that seemed to fit. I couldn't find documentation that described the localhost restriction.

However I learned there is a security concern when using the "Intr.net Indexing" configuration option which is why crawling localhost is prohibited under the "Search portal for your own web pages" option.