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Setting up Paperless-ngx

More moving parts than Papra above (a database, a broker, an OCR pipeline), in exchange for a more automated filing workflow.

  1. 1

    Download the official compose files

    Paperless-ngx publishes a ready-to-go docker-compose.yml and .env, already wired up with the database and broker it needs.

    mkdir paperless-ngx && cd paperless-ngx
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/main/docker/compose/docker-compose.sqlite.yml
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/main/docker/compose/.env
  2. 2

    Set the OCR language

    In .env, PAPERLESS_OCR_LANGUAGE controls which language Tesseract (the OCR engine underneath) uses; set it to whatever the actual documents are written in for accurate text extraction.

  3. 3

    Start it and create the admin account

    The management command below runs the same setup wizard as a fresh install.

    docker compose up -d
docker compose run --rm webserver createsuperuser
  4. 4

    Drop a scan into the consume folder

    Any file placed in the mounted consume directory gets picked up automatically: OCR'd, tagged if a matching rule exists, and filed into the archive within a minute or two, no manual upload step needed for a scanner that saves directly to that folder.

Further reading