Setup

Overview of Paperless-ng

Compared to paperless, paperless-ng works a little different under the hood and has more moving parts that work together. While this increases the complexity of the system, it also brings many benefits.

Paperless consists of the following components:

The webserver: This is pretty much the same as in paperless. It serves the administration pages, the API, and the new frontend. This is the main tool you’ll be using to interact with paperless. You may start the webserver with
```
$ cd /path/to/paperless/src/
$ gunicorn -c ../gunicorn.conf.py paperless.wsgi
```
or by any other means such as Apache mod_wsgi.
The consumer: This is what watches your consumption folder for documents. However, the consumer itself does not really consume your documents. Now it notifies a task processor that a new file is ready for consumption. I suppose it should be named differently. This was also used to check your emails, but that’s now done elsewhere as well.

Start the consumer with the management command document_consumer:
```
$ cd /path/to/paperless/src/
$ python3 manage.py document_consumer
```
The task processor: Paperless relies on Django Q for doing most of the heavy lifting. This is a task queue that accepts tasks from multiple sources and processes these in parallel. It also comes with a scheduler that executes certain commands periodically.

This task processor is responsible for:
- Consuming documents. When the consumer finds new documents, it notifies the task processor to start a consumption task.
- The task processor also performs the consumption of any documents you upload through the web interface.
- Consuming emails. It periodically checks your configured accounts for new emails and notifies the task processor to consume the attachment of an email.
- Maintaining the search index and the automatic matching algorithm. These are things that paperless needs to do from time to time in order to operate properly.
This allows paperless to process multiple documents from your consumption folder in parallel! On a modern multi core system, this makes the consumption process with full OCR blazingly fast.

The task processor comes with a built-in admin interface that you can use to check whenever any of the tasks fail and inspect the errors (i.e., wrong email credentials, errors during consuming a specific file, etc).

You may start the task processor by executing:
```
$ cd /path/to/paperless/src/
$ python3 manage.py qcluster
```
A redis message broker: This is a really lightweight service that is responsible for getting the tasks from the webserver and the consumer to the task scheduler. These run in a different process (maybe even on different machines!), and therefore, this is necessary.
Optional: A database server. Paperless supports both PostgreSQL and SQLite for storing its data.

Installation

You can go multiple routes to setup and run Paperless:

Use the easy install docker script
Pull the image from Docker Hub
Build the Docker image yourself
Install Paperless directly on your system manually (bare metal)
Use ansible to install Paperless on your system automatically (bare metal)

The Docker routes are quick & easy. These are the recommended routes. This configures all the stuff from the above automatically so that it just works and uses sensible defaults for all configuration options. Here you find a cheat-sheet for docker beginners: CLI Basics

The bare metal route is complicated to setup but makes it easier should you want to contribute some code back. You need to configure and run the above mentioned components yourself.

The ansible route combines benefits of both options: the setup process is fully automated, reproducible and idempotent, it includes the same sensible defaults, and it simultaneously provides the flexibility of a bare metal installation.

Install Paperless from Docker Hub using the installation script

Paperless provides an interactive installation script. This script will ask you for a couple configuration options, download and create the necessary configuration files, pull the docker image, start paperless and create your user account. This script essentially performs all the steps described in Install Paperless from Docker Hub automatically.

Make sure that docker and docker-compose are installed.

Download and run the installation script:

$ curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng/master/install-paperless-ng.sh | bash

Install Paperless from Docker Hub

Login with your user and create a folder in your home-directory mkdir -v ~/paperless-ng to have a place for your configuration files and consumption directory.
Go to the /docker/compose directory on the project page and download one of the docker-compose.*.yml files, depending on which database backend you want to use. Rename this file to docker-compose.yml. If you want to enable optional support for Office documents, download a file with -tika in the file name. Download the docker-compose.env file and the .env file as well and store them in the same directory.

Hint

For new installations, it is recommended to use PostgreSQL as the database backend.
Install Docker and docker-compose.

Caution

If you want to use the included docker-compose.*.yml file, you need to have at least Docker version 17.09.0 and docker-compose version 1.17.0. To check do: docker-compose -v or docker -v

See the Docker installation guide on how to install the current version of Docker for your operating system or Linux distribution of choice. To get the latest version of docker-compose, follow the docker-compose installation guide if your package repository doesn’t include it.
Modify docker-compose.yml to your preferences. You may want to change the path to the consumption directory. Find the line that specifies where to mount the consumption directory:
```
- ./consume:/usr/src/paperless/consume
```
Replace the part BEFORE the colon with a local directory of your choice:
```
- /home/jonaswinkler/paperless-inbox:/usr/src/paperless/consume
```
Don’t change the part after the colon or paperless wont find your documents.
Modify docker-compose.env, following the comments in the file. The most important change is to set USERMAP_UID and USERMAP_GID to the uid and gid of your user on the host system. Use id -u and id -g to get these.

This ensures that both the docker container and you on the host machine have write access to the consumption directory. If your UID and GID on the host system is 1000 (the default for the first normal user on most systems), it will work out of the box without any modifications. id “username” to check.

Note

You can copy any setting from the file paperless.conf.example and paste it here. Have a look at Configuration to see what’s available.

Caution

Some file systems such as NFS network shares don’t support file system notifications with inotify. When storing the consumption directory on such a file system, paperless will not pick up new files with the default configuration. You will need to use PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_POLLING, which will disable inotify. See here.
Run docker-compose pull, followed by docker-compose up -d. This will pull the image, create and start the necessary containers.
To be able to login, you will need a super user. To create it, execute the following command:
```
$ docker-compose run --rm webserver createsuperuser
```
This will prompt you to set a username, an optional e-mail address and finally a password (at least 8 characters).
The default docker-compose.yml exports the webserver on your local port 8000. If you did not change this, you should now be able to visit your Paperless instance at http://127.0.0.1:8000 or your servers IP-Address:8000. Use the login credentials you have created with the previous step.

Build the Docker image yourself

Clone the entire repository of paperless:
```
git clone https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng
```
The master branch always reflects the latest stable version.
Copy one of the docker/compose/docker-compose.*.yml to docker-compose.yml in the root folder, depending on which database backend you want to use. Copy docker-compose.env into the project root as well.
In the docker-compose.yml file, find the line that instructs docker-compose to pull the paperless image from Docker Hub:
```
webserver:
    image: jonaswinkler/paperless-ng:latest
```
and replace it with a line that instructs docker-compose to build the image from the current working directory instead:
```
webserver:
    build: .
```
Run the compile-frontend.sh script. This requires node and npm >= v15.
Follow steps 3 to 8 of Install Paperless from Docker Hub. When asked to run docker-compose pull to pull the image, do
```
$ docker-compose build
```
instead to build the image.

Bare Metal Route

Paperless runs on linux only. The following procedure has been tested on a minimal installation of Debian/Buster, which is the current stable release at the time of writing. Windows is not and will never be supported.

Install dependencies. Paperless requires the following packages.
- python3 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9
- python3-pip
- python3-dev
- fonts-liberation for generating thumbnails for plain text files
- imagemagick >= 6 for PDF conversion
- optipng for optimizing thumbnails
- gnupg for handling encrypted documents
- libpq-dev for PostgreSQL
- libmagic-dev for mime type detection
- mime-support for mime type detection
Use this list for your preferred package management:
```
python3 python3-pip python3-dev imagemagick fonts-liberation optipng gnupg libpq-dev libmagic-dev mime-support
```
These dependencies are required for OCRmyPDF, which is used for text recognition.
- unpaper
- ghostscript
- icc-profiles-free
- qpdf
- liblept5
- libxml2
- pngquant
- zlib1g
- tesseract-ocr >= 4.0.0 for OCR
- tesseract-ocr language packs (tesseract-ocr-eng, tesseract-ocr-deu, etc)
Use this list for your preferred package management:
```
unpaper ghostscript icc-profiles-free qpdf liblept5 libxml2 pngquant zlib1g tesseract-ocr
```
On Raspberry Pi, these libraries are required as well:
- libatlas-base-dev
- libxslt1-dev
You will also need build-essential, python3-setuptools and python3-wheel for installing some of the python dependencies.
Install redis >= 5.0 and configure it to start automatically.
Optional. Install postgresql and configure a database, user and password for paperless. If you do not wish to use PostgreSQL, SQLite is available as well.
Get the release archive from https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng/releases. If you clone the git repo as it is, you also have to compile the front end by yourself. Extract the archive to a place from where you wish to execute it, such as /opt/paperless.
Configure paperless. See Configuration for details. Edit the included paperless.conf and adjust the settings to your needs. Required settings for getting paperless running are:
- PAPERLESS_REDIS should point to your redis server, such as redis://localhost:6379.
- PAPERLESS_DBHOST should be the hostname on which your PostgreSQL server is running. Do not configure this to use SQLite instead. Also configure port, database name, user and password as necessary.
- PAPERLESS_CONSUMPTION_DIR should point to a folder which paperless should watch for documents. You might want to have this somewhere else. Likewise, PAPERLESS_DATA_DIR and PAPERLESS_MEDIA_ROOT define where paperless stores its data. If you like, you can point both to the same directory.
- PAPERLESS_SECRET_KEY should be a random sequence of characters. It’s used for authentication. Failure to do so allows third parties to forge authentication credentials.
Many more adjustments can be made to paperless, especially the OCR part. The following options are recommended for everyone:
- Set PAPERLESS_OCR_LANGUAGE to the language most of your documents are written in.
- Set PAPERLESS_TIME_ZONE to your local time zone.
Create a system user under which you wish to run paperless.
```
adduser paperless --system --home /opt/paperless --group
```
Ensure that these directories exist and that the paperless user has write permissions to the following directories:
- /opt/paperless/media
- /opt/paperless/data
- /opt/paperless/consume
Adjust as necessary if you configured different folders.
Install python requirements from the requirements.txt file. It is up to you if you wish to use a virtual environment or not. First you should update your pip, so it gets the actual packages.
```
sudo -Hu paperless pip3 install --upgrade pip
```
```
sudo -Hu paperless pip3 install -r requirements.txt
```
This will install all python dependencies in the home directory of the new paperless user.

Go to /opt/paperless/src, and execute the following commands:

# This creates the database schema.
sudo -Hu paperless python3 manage.py migrate

# This creates your first paperless user
sudo -Hu paperless python3 manage.py createsuperuser

Optional: Test that paperless is working by executing
# This collects static files from paperless and django. sudo -Hu paperless python3 manage.py runserver
and pointing your browser to http://localhost:8000/.

Warning

This is a development server which should not be used in production. It is not audited for security and performance is inferior to production ready web servers.

Hint

This will not start the consumer. Paperless does this in a separate process.
Setup systemd services to run paperless automatically. You may use the service definition files included in the scripts folder as a starting point.

Paperless needs the webserver script to run the webserver, the consumer script to watch the input folder, and the scheduler script to run tasks such as email checking and document consumption.

You may need to adjust the path to the gunicorn executable. This will be installed as part of the python dependencies, and is either located in the bin folder of your virtual environment, or in ~/.local/bin/ if no virtual environment is used.

These services rely on redis and optionally the database server, but don’t need to be started in any particular order. The example files depend on redis being started. If you use a database server, you should add additional dependencies.

Caution

The included scripts run a gunicorn standalone server, which is fine for running paperless. It does support SSL, however, the documentation of GUnicorn states that you should use a proxy server in front of gunicorn instead.

For instructions on how to use nginx for that, see the instructions below.
Optional: Install a samba server and make the consumption folder available as a network share.
Configure ImageMagick to allow processing of PDF documents. Most distributions have this disabled by default, since PDF documents can contain malware. If you don’t do this, paperless will fall back to ghostscript for certain steps such as thumbnail generation.

Edit /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml and adjust
```
<policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="PDF" />
```
to
```
<policy domain="coder" rights="read|write" pattern="PDF" />
```
Optional: Install the jbig2enc encoder. This will reduce the size of generated PDF documents. You’ll most likely need to compile this by yourself, because this software has been patented until around 2017 and binary packages are not available for most distributions.

Install Paperless using ansible

Note

This role currently only supports Debian 10 Buster and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal or later as target hosts.: Additionally, only i386 or amd64 based hosts are supported right now, i.e. installation on arm hosts will fail.

Install ansible 2.7+ on the management node. This may be the target host paperless-ng is being installed on or any remote host which can access the target host. For further details, check the ansible inventory documentation.

On Debian and Ubuntu, the official repositories should provide a suitable version:
```
apt install ansible
ansible --version
```
Alternatively, you can install the most recent ansible release using PyPI:
```
python3 -m pip install ansible
ansible --version
```
Make sure your taget hosts are accessible:
```
ansible -m ping YourAnsibleTargetHostGoesHere
```

Install the latest tag of the ansible role using ansible-galaxy

ansible-galaxy install git+https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng.git,ng-1.4.2

Create an ansible playbook.yml in a directory of your choice:

- hosts: YourAnsibleTargetHostGoesHere
  become: yes
  vars_files:
    - vars/paperless-ng.yml
  roles:
    - paperless-ng

Optional: If you also want to use PostgreSQL on the target system, install and add (for example) the geerlingguy.postgresql role:

ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.postgresql

- hosts: YourAnsibleTargetHostGoesHere
  become: yes
  vars_files:
    - vars/paperless-ng.yml
  roles:
    - geerlingguy.postgresql
    - paperless-ng

Optional: If you also want to use a reverse proxy on the target system, install and add (for example) the geerlingguy.nginx role:

ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.nginx

- hosts: YourAnsibleTargetHostGoesHere
  become: yes
  vars_files:
    - vars/paperless-ng.yml
  roles:
    - geerlingguy.postgresql
    - paperless-ng
    - geerlingguy.nginx

Create vars/paperless-ng.yml to configure your ansible deployment:

paperlessng_secret_key: PleaseGenerateAStrongKeyForThis

paperlessng_superuser_name: YourUserName
paperlessng_superuser_email: name@domain.tld
paperlessng_superuser_password: YourDesiredPasswordUsedForFirstLogin

paperlessng_ocr_languages:
    - eng
    - deu

For all of the available options, please check ansible/README.md and Configuration.

Optional configurations for the above-mentioned PostgreSQL and nginx roles would also go here.

Run the ansible playbook from the management node:
ansible-playbook playbook.yml
When this step completes successfully, paperless-ng will be available on the target host at http://127.0.0.1:8000 (or the address you configured).

Migration to paperless-ng

At its core, paperless-ng is still paperless and fully compatible. However, some things have changed under the hood, so you need to adapt your setup depending on how you installed paperless.

This setup describes how to update an existing paperless Docker installation. The important things to keep in mind are as follows:

Read the changelog and take note of breaking changes.
You should decide if you want to stick with SQLite or want to migrate your database to PostgreSQL. See Moving data from SQLite to PostgreSQL for details on how to move your data from SQLite to PostgreSQL. Both work fine with paperless. However, if you already have a database server running for other services, you might as well use it for paperless as well.
The task scheduler of paperless, which is used to execute periodic tasks such as email checking and maintenance, requires a redis message broker instance. The docker-compose route takes care of that.
The layout of the folder structure for your documents and data remains the same, so you can just plug your old docker volumes into paperless-ng and expect it to find everything where it should be.

Migration to paperless-ng is then performed in a few simple steps:

Stop paperless.

$ cd /path/to/current/paperless
$ docker-compose down

Do a backup for two purposes: If something goes wrong, you still have your data. Second, if you don’t like paperless-ng, you can switch back to paperless.
Download the latest release of paperless-ng. You can either go with the docker-compose files from here or clone the repository to build the image yourself (see above). You can either replace your current paperless folder or put paperless-ng in a different location.
Caution

Paperless-ng includes a .env file. This will set the project name for docker compose to paperless, which will also define the name of the volumes by paperless-ng. However, if you experience that paperless-ng is not using your old paperless volumes, verify the names of your volumes with
```
$ docker volume ls | grep _data
```
and adjust the project name in the .env file so that it matches the name of the volumes before the _data part.
Download the docker-compose.sqlite.yml file to docker-compose.yml. If you want to switch to PostgreSQL, do that after you migrated your existing SQLite database.
Adjust docker-compose.yml and docker-compose.env to your needs. See Install Paperless from Docker Hub for details on which edits are advised.
Update paperless.
In order to find your existing documents with the new search feature, you need to invoke a one-time operation that will create the search index:
```
$ docker-compose run --rm webserver document_index reindex
```
This will migrate your database and create the search index. After that, paperless will take care of maintaining the index by itself.
Start paperless-ng.
```
$ docker-compose up -d
```
This will run paperless in the background and automatically start it on system boot.
Paperless installed a permanent redirect to admin/ in your browser. This redirect is still in place and prevents access to the new UI. Clear your browsing cache in order to fix this.
Optionally, follow the instructions below to migrate your existing data to PostgreSQL.

Moving data from SQLite to PostgreSQL

Moving your data from SQLite to PostgreSQL is done via executing a series of django management commands as below.

Caution

Make sure that your SQLite database is migrated to the latest version. Starting paperless will make sure that this is the case. If your try to load data from an old database schema in SQLite into a newer database schema in PostgreSQL, you will run into trouble.

Warning

On some database fields, PostgreSQL enforces predefined limits on maximum length, whereas SQLite does not. The fields in question are the title of documents (128 characters), names of document types, tags and correspondents (128 characters), and filenames (1024 characters). If you have data in these fields that surpasses these limits, migration to PostgreSQL is not possible and will fail with an error.

Stop paperless, if it is running.
Tell paperless to use PostgreSQL:
1. With docker, copy the provided docker-compose.postgres.yml file to docker-compose.yml. Remember to adjust the consumption directory, if necessary.
2. Without docker, configure the database in your paperless.conf file. See Configuration for details.
Open a shell and initialize the database:
1. With docker, run the following command to open a shell within the paperless container:
```
$ cd /path/to/paperless
$ docker-compose run --rm webserver /bin/bash
```
  This will launch the container and initialize the PostgreSQL database.
2. Without docker, remember to activate any virtual environment, switch to the src directory and create the database schema:
```
$ cd /path/to/paperless/src
$ python3 manage.py migrate
```
  This will not copy any data yet.

Dump your data from SQLite:

$ python3 manage.py dumpdata --database=sqlite --exclude=contenttypes --exclude=auth.Permission > data.json

Load your data into PostgreSQL:
```
$ python3 manage.py loaddata data.json
```
If operating inside Docker, you may exit the shell now.
```
$ exit
```
Start paperless.

Moving back to paperless

Lets say you migrated to Paperless-ng and used it for a while, but decided that you don’t like it and want to move back (If you do, send me a mail about what part you didn’t like!), you can totally do that with a few simple steps.

Paperless-ng modified the database schema slightly, however, these changes can be reverted while keeping your current data, so that your current data will be compatible with original Paperless.

Execute this:

$ cd /path/to/paperless
$ docker-compose run --rm webserver migrate documents 0023

Or without docker:

$ cd /path/to/paperless/src
$ python3 manage.py migrate documents 0023

After that, you need to clear your cookies (Paperless-ng comes with updated dependencies that do cookie-processing differently) and probably your cache as well.

Considerations for less powerful devices

Paperless runs on Raspberry Pi. However, some things are rather slow on the Pi and configuring some options in paperless can help improve performance immensely:

Stick with SQLite to save some resources.
Consider setting PAPERLESS_OCR_PAGES to 1, so that paperless will only OCR the first page of your documents. In most cases, this page contains enough information to be able to find it.
PAPERLESS_TASK_WORKERS and PAPERLESS_THREADS_PER_WORKER are configured to use all cores. The Raspberry Pi models 3 and up have 4 cores, meaning that paperless will use 2 workers and 2 threads per worker. This may result in sluggish response times during consumption, so you might want to lower these settings (example: 2 workers and 1 thread to always have some computing power left for other tasks).
Keep PAPERLESS_OCR_MODE at its default value skip and consider OCR’ing your documents before feeding them into paperless. Some scanners are able to do this! You might want to even specify skip_noarchive to skip archive file generation for already ocr’ed documents entirely.
If you want to perform OCR on the the device, consider using PAPERLESS_OCR_CLEAN=none. This will speed up OCR times and use less memory at the expense of slightly worse OCR results.
Set PAPERLESS_OPTIMIZE_THUMBNAILS to ‘false’ if you want faster consumption times. Thumbnails will be about 20% larger.
If using docker, consider setting PAPERLESS_WEBSERVER_WORKERS to 1. This will save some memory.

For details, refer to Configuration.

Note

Updating the automatic matching algorithm takes quite a bit of time. However, the update mechanism checks if your data has changed before doing the heavy lifting. If you experience the algorithm taking too much cpu time, consider changing the schedule in the admin interface to daily. You can also manually invoke the task by changing the date and time of the next run to today/now.

The actual matching of the algorithm is fast and works on Raspberry Pi as well as on any other device.

Using nginx as a reverse proxy

If you want to expose paperless to the internet, you should hide it behind a reverse proxy with SSL enabled.

In addition to the usual configuration for SSL, the following configuration is required for paperless to operate:

http {

    # Adjust as required. This is the maximum size for file uploads.
    # The default value 1M might be a little too small.
    client_max_body_size 10M;

    server {

        location / {

            # Adjust host and port as required.
            proxy_pass http://localhost:8000/;

            # These configuration options are required for WebSockets to work.
            proxy_http_version 1.1;
            proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
            proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";

            proxy_redirect off;
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $server_name;
        }
    }
}

Also read this, towards the end of the section.