mirror of
https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx.git
synced 2025-04-02 13:45:10 -05:00
106 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
106 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
# paperless
|
|
Scan, index, and archive all of your paper documents
|
|
|
|
I hate paper. Environmental issues aside, it's a tech person's nightmare:
|
|
|
|
* There's no search feature
|
|
* It takes up physical space
|
|
* Backups mean more paper
|
|
|
|
In the past few months I've been bitten more than a few times by the problem
|
|
of not having the right document around. Sometimes I recycled a document I
|
|
needed (who keeps water bills for two years?) and other times I just lost
|
|
it... because paper. I wrote this to make my life easier.
|
|
|
|
## How it Works:
|
|
|
|
1. Buy a document scanner like [this one](http://www.brother.ca/en-CA/Scanners/11/ProductDetail/ADS1500W?ProductDetail=productdetail).
|
|
2. Set it up to "scan to FTP" or something similar. It should be able to push
|
|
scanned images to a server without you having to do anything.
|
|
3. Have the target server run the *paperless* consumption script to OCR the PDF
|
|
and index it into a local database.
|
|
4. Use the web frontend to sift through the database and find what you want.
|
|
5. Download the PDF you need/want via the web interface and do whatever you
|
|
like with it. You can even print it and send it as if it's the original.
|
|
In most cases, no one will care or notice.
|
|
|
|
|
|
## Stability
|
|
|
|
Paperless is still under active development (just look at the git commit
|
|
history) so don't expect it to be 100% stable. I'm using it for my own
|
|
documents, but I'm crazy like that. If you use this and it breaks something,
|
|
you get to keep all the shiny pieces.
|
|
|
|
|
|
## Requirements
|
|
|
|
This is all really a quite simple, shiny, user-friendly wrapper around some very
|
|
powerful tools.
|
|
|
|
* [ImageMagick](http://imagemagick.org/) converts the images between colour and
|
|
greyscale.
|
|
* [Tesseract](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr) does the character recognition
|
|
* [GNU Privacy Guard](https://gnupg.org)
|
|
* [Python 3](https://python.org/) is the language of the project
|
|
* [Pillow](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pillowfight/) loads the image data
|
|
as a python object to be used with PyOCR.
|
|
* [PyOCR](https://github.com/jflesch/pyocr) is a slick programmatic wrapper
|
|
around tesseract
|
|
* [Django](https://djangoproject.org/) is the framework this project is
|
|
written against.
|
|
* [Python-GNUPG](http://pythonhosted.org/python-gnupg/) decrypts the PDFs
|
|
on-the-fly to allow you to download unencrypted files, leaving the
|
|
encrypted ones on-disk.
|
|
|
|
The keen eye might have noticed that we're converting a PDF to an image to be
|
|
read by Tesseract, and to do this we're using a chain of: scanned PDF >
|
|
Imagemagick > Pillow > PyOCR > Tesseract > text. It's not ideal, but
|
|
apparently, Pillow lacks the ability to read PDFs, and PyOCR requires a Pillow
|
|
object, so we're sort of stuck.
|
|
|
|
|
|
## Instructions
|
|
|
|
1. Check out this repo to somewhere convenient and install the requirements
|
|
listed here into your environment.
|
|
|
|
2. Configure `settings.py` and make sure that `CONVERT_BINARY`, `SCRATCH_DIR`,
|
|
and `CONSUMPTION_DIR` are set to values you'd expect:
|
|
|
|
* `CONVERT_BINARY`: The path to `convert`, installed as part of ImageMagick.
|
|
* `SCRATCH_DIR`: A place for files to be created and destroyed. The default
|
|
is as good a place as any.
|
|
* `CONSUMPTION_DIR`: The directory into which your scanner will be
|
|
depositing files. Note that the consumption script will import files from
|
|
here **and then delete them**.
|
|
* `PASSPHRASE`: You can set this here, or allow the running of the service
|
|
to ask you for it each time you start. If you store the value here, you
|
|
should probably set the permissions on `settings.py` to `0400`.
|
|
|
|
3. Run `python manage.py migrate`. This will create your local database if it
|
|
doesn't exist. You should probably change the permissions on this database
|
|
file to 0600.
|
|
|
|
4. Run `python manage.py createsuperuser` and follow the prompts that follow
|
|
to create a user for logging in.
|
|
|
|
5. Run `python manage.py document_consumer`.
|
|
|
|
6. Start the webserver with `python manage.py runserver` and enter the same
|
|
passphrase when prompted.
|
|
|
|
7. Log into your new toy by visiting `http://localhost:8000/`.
|
|
|
|
|
|
## Important Note
|
|
|
|
Document scanners are typically used to scan sensitive documents. Things like
|
|
your social insurance number, tax records, invoices, etc. While paperless
|
|
encrypts the original PDFs via the consumption script, the OCR'd text is *not*
|
|
encrypted and is therefore stored in the clear (it needs to be searchable, so
|
|
if someone has ideas on how to do that on encrypted data, I'm all ears). This
|
|
means that paperless should never be run on an untrusted host. Instead, I
|
|
recommend that if you do want to use it, run it locally on a server in your own
|
|
home.
|