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Perplexity Search

warning

This tutorial is a community contribution and is not supported by the Open WebUI team. It serves only as a demonstration on how to customize Open WebUI for your specific use case. Want to contribute? Check out the contributing tutorial.

Perplexity Search API​

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Perplexity Search API is just a search engine, as opposed to the Perplexity integration, which is using Perplexity's models (in combination with their websearch).

Setup​

  1. Navigate to: Admin Panel -> Settings -> Web Search
  2. Toggle Enable Web Search
  3. Set Web Search Engine from dropdown menu to perplexity_search
  4. Enter your Perplexity API key from Perplexity API Key management.
  5. Press save

You can use a LiteLLM proxy instance as your search provider instead of connecting directly to Perplexity. LiteLLM's /search endpoint is compatible with the Perplexity Search API style used by Open WebUI.

To configure this:

  1. Follow the setup steps above, selecting perplexity_search as the engine.
  2. Under the Perplexity Search API Base URL field, replace the default URL with your LiteLLM endpoint.
  3. The URL must follow this specific format: http://<your-litellm-url>/search/<your-search-provider-name> - Ensurethe search provider name matches the provider name you configured in your LiteLLM setup.

Example:

If your LiteLLM instance is running on localhost and you want to use the perplexity-search provider defined in your LiteLLM config:

http://localhost:4000/search/perplexity-search