Antfly is a distributed search engine built on etcd's raft library. It combines full-text search (BM25), vector similarity, and graph traversal over multimodal data — text, images, audio, and video. Embeddings, chunking, and graph edges are generated automatically as you write data. Built-in RAG agents tie it all together with retrieval-augmented generation.
# Start a single-node cluster with built-in ML inference
go run ./cmd/antfly swarm
# Or run with Docker
docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/antflydb/antfly:omniThat gives you the Antfarm dashboard at http://localhost:8080 — playgrounds for search, RAG, knowledge graphs, embeddings, reranking, and more.
See the quickstart guide for a full walkthrough.
- Hybrid search — full-text (BM25), dense vectors, and sparse vectors (SPLADE), all in one query
- RAG agents — built-in retrieval-augmented generation with streaming, multi-turn chat, tool calling (web search, graph traversal), and confidence scoring
- Graph indexes — automatic relationship extraction and graph traversal queries over your data
- Multimodal — index and search images, audio, and video with CLIP, CLAP, and vision-language models
- Reranking — cross-encoder reranking with score-based pruning to cut the noise
- Aggregations — stats (sum/min/max/avg) and terms facets for analytics
- Transactions — ACID transactions at the shard level with distributed coordination
- Document TTL — automatic document expiration so you don't have to clean up yourself
- S3 storage — store data in S3/MinIO/R2 for big cost savings and way faster shard splits
- SIMD / SME acceleration — vector operations use hardware intrinsics via go-highway on x86 and ARM
- Distributed — Raft consensus, automatic sharding and replication, horizontal scaling
- Enrichment pipelines — configurable pipelines per index for embeddings, summaries, graph edges, and custom computed fields
- Bring your own models — Ollama, OpenAI, Bedrock, Google, or run models locally with Termite
- Auth — built-in user management with API keys, basic auth, and bearer tokens
- Backup & restore — to local disk or S3
- Kubernetes operator — deploy and manage clusters with the operator
- MCP server — Model Context Protocol so LLMs can use Antfly as a tool
- A2A protocol — Agent-to-Agent support for Google's A2A standard
- Antfarm — web dashboard with playgrounds for search, RAG, knowledge graphs, embeddings, reranking, chunking, NER, OCR, and transcription
pgaf brings Antfly search into Postgres. Create an index, use the @@@ operator, and you're done:
CREATE INDEX idx_content ON docs USING antfly (content)
WITH (url = 'http://localhost:8080/api/v1/', collection = 'my_docs');
SELECT * FROM docs WHERE content @@@ 'fix my computer';@antfly/components gives you drop-in React components for search UIs — SearchBox, Autosuggest, Facet, Results, RAGBox, AnswerBox, plus streaming hooks like useAnswerStream and useCitations.
Termite handles the ML side: embeddings, chunking, reranking, classification, NER, OCR, transcription, generation, and more. It ships as a submodule and runs automatically in swarm mode — you don't need to set it up separately.
| Package | What it does | Source |
|---|---|---|
| docsaf | Ingest content from filesystem, web crawl, git repos, and S3 | pkg/docsaf |
| evalaf | LLM/RAG/agent evaluation ("promptfoo for Go") | pkg/evalaf |
| Genkit plugin | Firebase Genkit integration for retrieval and docstore | pkg/genkit/antfly |
Antfly uses a multi-raft design with separate consensus groups:
- Metadata raft — table schemas, shard assignments, cluster topology
- Storage rafts — one per shard, handling data, indexes, and queries
End-to-end chaos tests — inspired by Jepsen — cover node crashes, leader failures, shard splits under load, and cluster scaling. These tests run real multi-node clusters and inject faults to verify that Raft consensus, transactions, and replication behave correctly under failure.
Critical distributed protocols are formally specified and model-checked with TLA+:
Join the Discord for support, discussion, and updates.
Interested in contributing? See CONTRIBUTING.md.
The core server is Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2). That means you can use it, modify it, self-host it, and build products on top of it — you just can't offer Antfly itself as a managed service. Everything else — the SDKs, React components, Termite, pgaf, docsaf, evalaf — is Apache 2.0. We tried to keep as much as possible under a permissive license.