# Setup - Paperless-ngx

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## Installation

You can go multiple routes to setup and run Paperless:

- Use the script to setup a Docker install
- Use the Docker compose templates
- Build the Docker image yourself
- Install Paperless-ngx directly on your system manually ("bare metal")
- A user-maintained list of commercial hosting providers can be found in the wiki

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.

### Use the Installation Script

Paperless provides an interactive installation script to setup a Docker Compose installation. The script asks for a couple configuration options, and will then create the necessary configuration files, pull the docker image, start Paperless-ngx and create your superuser account. The script essentially automatically performs the steps described in Docker setup.

1. Make sure that Docker and Docker Compose are installed.

2. Download and run the installation script:

       bash -c "$(curl --location --silent --show-error https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/main/install-paperless-ngx.sh)"

   Note

   macOS users will need to install gnu-sed with support for running as `sed` as well as wget.

### Use Docker Compose

1. Make sure that Docker and Docker Compose are installed.

2. 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. Place the files in a local directory and rename it `docker-compose.yml`. Download the `docker-compose.env` file and the `.env` file as well in the same directory.

   If you want to enable optional support for Office and other documents, download a file with `-tika` in the file name.

   Tip

   For new installations, it is recommended to use PostgreSQL as the database backend.

3. Modify `docker-compose.yml` as needed. For example, you may want to change the paths to the consumption, media etc. directories to use 'bind mounts'. Find the line that specifies where to mount the directory, e.g.:

       - ./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

   You may also want to change the default port that the webserver will use from the default (8000) to something else, e.g. for port 8010:

       ports:
           - 8010:8000

   Rootless

   Warning

   It is currently not possible to run the container rootless if additional languages are specified via `PAPERLESS_OCR_LANGUAGES`.

   If you want to run Paperless as a rootless container, you will need to do the following in your `docker-compose.yml`:

   - set the `user` running the container to map to the `paperless` user in the container. This value (`user_id` below), should be the same id that `USERMAP_UID` and `USERMAP_GID` are set to in the next step. See `USERMAP_UID` and `USERMAP_GID` here.

   Your entry for Paperless should contain something like:

   >     webserver:
   >       image: ghcr.io/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx:latest
   >       user: <user_id>

4. Modify `docker-compose.env` with any configuration options you'd like. See the configuration documentation for all options.

   You may also need 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 container and the host user 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. Run `id "username"` to check.

   Note

   You can utilize Docker secrets for configuration settings by appending `_FILE` to configuration values. For example `PAPERLESS_DBUSER` can be set using `PAPERLESS_DBUSER_FILE=/var/run/secrets/password.txt`.

   Warning

   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.

5. Run `docker compose pull`. This will pull the image from the GitHub container registry by default but you can change the image to pull from Docker Hub by changing the `image` line to `image: paperlessngx/paperless-ngx:latest`.

6. Run `docker compose up -d`. This will create and start the necessary containers.

7. Congratulations! Your Paperless-ngx instance should now be accessible at `http://127.0.0.1:8000` (or similar, depending on your configuration). When you first access the web interface, you will be prompted to create a superuser account.

### Build the Docker image yourself

1. Clone the entire repository of paperless:

       git clone https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

   The main branch always reflects the latest stable version.

2. 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.

3. In the `docker-compose.yml` file, find the line that instructs Docker Compose to pull the paperless image from Docker Hub:

       webserver:
           image: ghcr.io/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx:latest

   and replace it with a line that instructs Docker Compose to build the image from the current working directory instead:

       webserver:
           build:
               context: .

4. Follow the Docker setup above except when asked to run `docker compose pull` to pull the image, run

       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.

Paperless requires Python 3. At this time, 3.10 - 3.12 are tested versions. Newer versions may work, but some dependencies may not fully support newer versions. Support for older Python versions may be dropped as they reach end of life or as newer versions are released, dependency support is confirmed, etc.

1. Install dependencies. Paperless requires the following packages.

   - `python3`
   - `python3-pip`
   - `python3-dev`
   - `default-libmysqlclient-dev` for MariaDB
   - `pkg-config` for mysqlclient (python dependency)
   - `fonts-liberation` for generating thumbnails for plain text files
   - `imagemagick` >= 6 for PDF conversion
   - `gnupg` for handling encrypted documents
   - `libpq-dev` for PostgreSQL
   - `libmagic-dev` for mime type detection
   - `mariadb-client` for MariaDB compile time
   - `libzbar0` for barcode detection
   - `poppler-utils` for barcode detection

   Use this list for your preferred package management:

       python3 python3-pip python3-dev imagemagick fonts-liberation gnupg libpq-dev default-libmysqlclient-dev pkg-config libmagic-dev libzbar0 poppler-utils

   These dependencies are required for OCRmyPDF, which is used for text recognition.

   - `unpaper`
   - `ghostscript`
   - `icc-profiles-free`
   - `qpdf`
   - `liblept5`
   - `libxml2`
   - `pngquant` (suggested for certain PDF image optimizations)
   - `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`
   - `mime-support`

   You will also need these for installing some of the python dependencies:

   - `build-essential`
   - `python3-setuptools`
   - `python3-wheel`

   Use this list for your preferred package management:

       build-essential python3-setuptools python3-wheel

2. Install `redis` >= 6.0 and configure it to start automatically.

3. Optional. Install `postgresql` and configure a database, user and password for paperless. If you do not wish to use PostgreSQL, MariaDB and SQLite are available as well.

   Note

   On bare-metal installations using SQLite, ensure the JSON1 extension is enabled. This is usually the case, but not always.

4. Create a system user with a new home folder under which you wish to run paperless.

       adduser paperless --system --home /opt/paperless --group

5. Get the release archive from https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/releases for example with

       curl -O -L https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/releases/download/v1.10.2/paperless-ngx-v1.10.2.tar.xz

   Extract the archive with

       tar -xf paperless-ngx-v1.10.2.tar.xz

   and copy the contents to the home folder of the user you created before (`/opt/paperless`).

   Optional: If you cloned the git repo, you will have to compile the frontend yourself, see here and use the `build` step, not `serve`.

6. 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>.</redis:>
   - `PAPERLESS_DBENGINE` optional, and should be one of `postgres`, `mariadb`, or `sqlite`
   - `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.
   - `PAPERLESS_URL` if you are behind a reverse proxy. This should point to your domain. Please see configuration for more information.

   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.

   Warning

   Ensure your Redis instance is secured.

7. Create the following directories if they are missing:

   - `/opt/paperless/media`
   - `/opt/paperless/data`
   - `/opt/paperless/consume`

   Adjust as necessary if you configured different folders. Ensure that the paperless user has write permissions for every one of these folders with

       ls -l -d /opt/paperless/media

   If needed, change the owner with

       sudo chown paperless:paperless /opt/paperless/media
       sudo chown paperless:paperless /opt/paperless/data
       sudo chown paperless:paperless /opt/paperless/consume

8. Install python requirements from the `requirements.txt` file.

       sudo -Hu paperless pip3 install -r requirements.txt

   This will install all python dependencies in the home directory of the new paperless user.

   Tip

   It is up to you if you wish to use a virtual environment or not for the Python dependencies. This is an alternative to the above and may require adjusting the example scripts to utilize the virtual environment paths

   Tip

   If you use modern Python tooling, such as `uv`, installation will not include dependencies for Postgres or Mariadb. You can select those extras with `--extra <EXTRA>` or all with `--all-extras`

9. Go to `/opt/paperless/src`, and execute the following command:

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

   When you first access the web interface you will be prompted to create a superuser account.

10. Optional: Test that paperless is working by executing

        # Manually starts the webserver
        sudo -Hu paperless python3 manage.py runserver

    and pointing your browser to http://localhost:8000 if accessing from the same devices on which paperless is installed. If accessing from another machine, set up systemd services. You may need to set `PAPERLESS_DEBUG=true` in order for the development server to work normally in your browser.

    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.

    Tip

    This will not start the consumer. Paperless does this in a separate process.

11. 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, `taskqueue` for the background workers used to handle things like document consumption and the `scheduler` script to run tasks such as email checking at certain times .

    Note

    The `socket` script enables `granian` to run on port 80 without root privileges. For this you need to uncomment the `Require=paperless-webserver.socket` in the `webserver` script and configure `granian` to listen on port 80 (set `GRANIAN_PORT`).

    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.

    Note

    For instructions on using a reverse proxy, see the wiki.

    Warning

    If celery won't start (check with `sudo systemctl status paperless-task-queue.service` for paperless-task-queue.service and paperless-scheduler.service ) you need to change the path in the files. Example: `ExecStart=/opt/paperless/.local/bin/celery --app paperless worker --loglevel INFO`

12. Optional: Install a samba server and make the consumption folder available as a network share.

13. 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" />

14. 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.

15. Optional: If using the NLTK machine learning processing (see `PAPERLESS_ENABLE_NLTK` for details), download the NLTK data for the Snowball Stemmer, Stopwords and Punkt tokenizer to `/usr/share/nltk_data`. Refer to the NLTK instructions for details on how to download the data.

# Migrating to Paperless-ngx

Migration is possible both from Paperless-ng or directly from the 'original' Paperless.

## Migrating from Paperless-ng

Paperless-ngx is meant to be a drop-in replacement for Paperless-ng and thus upgrading should be trivial for most users, especially when using docker. However, as with any major change, it is recommended to take a full backup first. Once you are ready, simply change the docker image to point to the new source. E.g. if using Docker Compose, edit `docker-compose.yml` and change:

    image: jonaswinkler/paperless-ng:latest

to

    image: ghcr.io/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx:latest

and then run `docker compose up -d` which will pull the new image recreate the container. That's it!

Users who installed with the bare-metal route should also update their Git clone to point to `https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx`, e.g. using the command `git remote set-url origin https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx` and then pull the latest version.

## Migrating from Paperless

At its core, paperless-ngx 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 documentation 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-ngx and expect it to find everything where it should be.

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

1. Stop paperless.

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

2. Do a backup for two purposes: If something goes wrong, you still have your data. Second, if you don't like paperless-ngx, you can switch back to paperless.

3. Download the latest release of paperless-ngx. 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-ngx in a different location.

   Warning

   Paperless-ngx 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-ngx. However, if you experience that paperless-ngx 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.

4. 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.

5. Adjust `docker-compose.yml` and `docker-compose.env` to your needs. See Docker setup details on which edits are advised.

6. Update paperless.

7. 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.

8. Start paperless-ngx.

       docker compose up -d

   This will run paperless in the background and automatically start it on system boot.

9. 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.

10. Optionally, follow the instructions below to migrate your existing data to PostgreSQL.

## Migrating from LinuxServer.io Docker Image

As with any upgrades and large changes, it is highly recommended to create a backup before starting. This assumes the image was running using Docker Compose, but the instructions are translatable to Docker commands as well.

1. Stop and remove the paperless container
2. If using an external database, stop the container

3. Update Redis configuration

   1. If `REDIS_URL` is already set, change it to `PAPERLESS_REDIS` and continue to step 4.

   2. Otherwise, in the `docker-compose.yml` add a new service for Redis, following the example compose files

   3. Set the environment variable `PAPERLESS_REDIS` so it points to the new Redis container

4. Update user mapping

   1. If set, change the environment variable `PUID` to `USERMAP_UID`

   2. If set, change the environment variable `PGID` to `USERMAP_GID`

5. Update configuration paths

   1. Set the environment variable `PAPERLESS_DATA_DIR` to `/config`

6. Update media paths

   1. Set the environment variable `PAPERLESS_MEDIA_ROOT` to `/data/media`

7. Update timezone

   1. Set the environment variable `PAPERLESS_TIME_ZONE` to the same value as `TZ`

8. Modify the `image:` to point to `ghcr.io/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx:latest` or a specific version if preferred.

9. Start the containers as before, using `docker compose`.

## Moving data from SQLite to PostgreSQL or MySQL/MariaDB

The best way to migrate between database types is to perform an export and then import into a clean installation of Paperless-ngx.

## Moving back to Paperless

Lets say you migrated to Paperless-ngx 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-ngx 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. Thumbnails were also changed from PNG to WEBP format and will need to be re-generated.

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 regenerating thumbnails, you'll need to clear your cookies (Paperless-ngx 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. See troubleshooting if you encounter issues with SQLite locking.
- If you do not need the filesystem-based consumer, consider disabling it entirely by setting `PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_DISABLE` to `true`.
- 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!
- Set `PAPERLESS_OCR_SKIP_ARCHIVE_FILE` to `with_text` to skip archive file generation for already ocr'ed documents, or `always` to skip it for all documents.
- If you want to perform OCR on 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.
- If using docker, consider setting `PAPERLESS_WEBSERVER_WORKERS` to 1. This will save some memory.
- Consider setting `PAPERLESS_ENABLE_NLTK` to false, to disable the more advanced language processing, which can take more memory and processing time.

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

Please see the wiki for user-maintained documentation of using nginx with Paperless-ngx.

# Enhancing security

Please see the wiki for user-maintained documentation of how to configure security tools like Fail2ban with Paperless-ngx.