Papermerge DMS

Papermerge DMS or simply Papermerge is a open source document management system designed to work with scanned documents (also called digital archives). It extracts text from your scans using OCR, indexes them, and prepares them for full text search. Papermerge provides the look and feel of modern desktop file browsers. It has features like dual panel document browser, drag and drop, tags, hierarchical folders and full text search so that you can efficiently store and organize your documents.

It supports PDF, TIFF, JPEG and PNG document file formats. Papermerge is perfect tool for long term storage of your documents.

Features Highlights

• Web UI with desktop like experience
• OpenAPI compliant REST API
• Works with PDF, JPEG, PNG and TIFF documents
• OCR (Optical Character Recognition) of the documents (uses OCRmyPDF)
• OCRed text overlay (you can download document with OCRed text overlay)
• Full Text Search of the scanned documents (supports Solr backend, uses Xapian by default)
• Document Versioning
• Tags - assign colored tags to documents or folders
• Documents and Folders - users can organize documents in folders
• Multi-User
• Page Management - delete, reorder, cut & paste pages (uses PikePDF)

Documentation

Papermerge DMS documentation is available at https://docs.papermerge.io

Docker

In order to start Papermerge REST API server as docker image use following command:

docker run -p 8000:80 \
    -e PAPERMERGE__SECURITY__SECRET_KEY=abc \
    -e PAPERMERGE__AUTH__PASSWORD=123 \
    papermerge/papermerge:3.0.3

If you want initial superuser to have another username (e.g. john), use PAPERMERGE__AUTH__USERNAME environment variable:

docker run -p 8000:80 \
    -e PAPERMERGE__SECURITY__SECRET_KEY=abc \
    -e PAPERMERGE__AUTH__PASSWORD=123 \
    -e PAPERMERGE__AUTH__USERNAME=john \
    papermerge/papermerge:3.0.3

Note that above docker command start only web UI. In order to run OCR on the documents you need at least one worker instance.

Docker Compose

Here is an example of complete setup with web ui, one worker (which performs OCR), and PostgreSQL database for storing data:

  version: "3.9"

  x-backend: &common
    image: papermerge/papermerge:3.0.3
    environment:
        PAPERMERGE__SECURITY__SECRET_KEY: 12345
        PAPERMERGE__AUTH__USERNAME: john
        PAPERMERGE__AUTH__PASSWORD: hohoho
        PAPERMERGE__DATABASE__URL: postgresql://scott:tiger@db:5432/mydatabase
        PAPERMERGE__REDIS__URL: redis://redis:6379/0
    volumes:
      - index_db:/core_app/index_db
      - media:/core_app/media
  services:
    web:
      <<: *common
      ports:
       - "12000:80"
      depends_on:
        - redis
        - db
    worker:
      <<: *common
      command: worker
    redis:
      image: redis:6
    db:
      image: bitnami/postgresql:16.1.0
      volumes:
        - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data/
      environment:
        POSTGRESQL_USER: scott
        POSTGRESQL_PASSWORD: tiger
        POSTGRESQL_POSTGRES_PASSWORD: tiger
        POSTGRESQL_DATABASE: mydatabase
  volumes:
    postgres_data:
    index_db:
    media:

Open your web browser and point it to http://localhost:12000.

Following docker compose file starts Papermerge (web UI and one worker) with MariaDB as database and Solr as search engine backend:

version: "3.9"

x-backend: &common
  image: papermerge/papermerge:3.0.3
  environment:
      PAPERMERGE__SECURITY__SECRET_KEY: 1234  # top secret
      PAPERMERGE__AUTH__USERNAME: eugen
      PAPERMERGE__AUTH__PASSWORD: 1234
      PAPERMERGE__DATABASE__URL: mysql://myuser:mypass@db:3306/paperdb
      PAPERMERGE__REDIS__URL: redis://redis:6379/0
      PAPERMERGE__SEARCH__URL: solr://solr:8983/pmg-index
  volumes:
    - media_root:/core_app/media
  depends_on:
    - redis
    - solr
    - db

services:
  web:
    <<: *common
    ports:
     - "12000:80"
  worker:
    <<: *common
    command: worker
  redis:
    image: redis:6
  solr:
    image: solr:9.3
    ports:
     - "8983:8983"
    volumes:
      - solr_data:/var/solr
    command:
      - solr-precreate
      - pmg-index
  db:
    image: mariadb:11.2
    volumes:
      - maria:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: mypass
      MYSQL_DATABASE: paperdb
      MYSQL_USER: myuser
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: mypass
volumes:
  maria:
  solr_data:
  media_root:

Open your web browser and point it to http://localhost:12000.

Ansible Playbook

In order to deploy Papermerge on remote production machine (homelab VM, or cloud VPS instance) use following Ansible Playbook.

Tests

poetry install
poetry shell
pytest tests/

Linting

Use following command to make sure that your code is formatted per PEP8 spec:

poetry run task lint