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Frequently asked questions

Q: What's the general plan for Paperless-ng?

A: Paperless-ng is already almost feature-complete. This project will remain as simple as it is right now. It will see improvements to features that are already there. If you need advanced features such as document versions, workflows or multi-user with customizable access to individual files, this is not the tool for you.

Features that are planned are some more quality of life extensions for the searching (i.e., search for similar documents, group results by correspondents with "more from this" links, etc), bulk editing and hierarchical tags.

Q: I'm using docker. Where are my documents?

A: Your documents are stored inside the docker volume paperless_media. Docker manages this volume automatically for you. It is a persistent storage and will persist as long as you don't explicitly delete it. The actual location depends on your host operating system. On Linux, chances are high that this location is

/var/lib/docker/volumes/paperless_media/_data

Caution!

Do not mess with this folder. Don't change permissions and don't move files around manually. This folder is meant to be entirely managed by docker and paperless.

Q: Let's say you don't support this project anymore in a year. Can I easily move to other systems?

A: Your documents are stored as plain files inside the media folder. You can always drag those files out of that folder to use them elsewhere. Here are a couple notes about that.

  • Paperless never modifies your original documents. It keeps checksums of all documents and uses a scheduled sanity checker to check that they remain the same.
  • By default, paperless uses the internal ID of each document as its filename. This might not be very convenient for export. However, you can adjust the way files are stored in paperless by :ref:`configuring the filename format <advanced-file_name_handling>`.
  • :ref:`The exporter <utilities-exporter>` is another easy way to get your files out of paperless with reasonable file names.

Q: What file types does paperless-ng support?

A: Currently, the following files are supported:

  • PDF documents, PNG images, JPEG images, TIFF images and GIF images are processed with OCR and converted into PDF documents.
  • Plain text documents are supported as well and are added verbatim to paperless.
  • With the optional Tika integration enabled (see :ref:`Configuration <configuration-tika>`), Paperless also supports various Office documents (.docx, .doc, odt, .ppt, .pptx, .odp, .xls, .xlsx, .ods).

Paperless determines the type of a file by inspecting its content. The file extensions do not matter.

Q: Will paperless-ng run on Raspberry Pi?

A: The short answer is yes. I've tested it on a Raspberry Pi 3 B. The long answer is that certain parts of Paperless will run very slow, such as the OCR. On Raspberry Pi, try to OCR documents before feeding them into paperless so that paperless can reuse the text. The web interface is a lot snappier, since it runs in your browser and paperless has to do much less work to serve the data.

Note

You can adjust some of the settings so that paperless uses less processing power. See :ref:`setup-less_powerful_devices` for details.

Q: How do I install paperless-ng on Raspberry Pi?

A: Docker images are available for arm and arm64 hardware, so just follow the docker-compose instructions. Apart from more required disk space compared to a bare metal installation, docker comes with close to zero overhead, even on Raspberry Pi.

If you decide to got with the bare metal route, be aware that some of the python requirements do not have precompiled packages for ARM / ARM64. Installation of these will require additional development libraries and compilation will take a long time.

Q: How do I run this on unRaid?

A: Head over to https://github.com/selfhosters/unRAID-CA-templates, Uli Fahrer created a container template for that. I don't exactly know how to use that though, since I don't use unRaid.

Q: How do I run this on my toaster?

A: I honestly don't know! As for all other devices that might be able to run paperless, you're a bit on your own. If you can't run the docker image, the documentation has instructions for bare metal installs. I'm running paperless on an i3 processor from 2015 or so. This is also what I use to test new releases with. Apart from that, I also have a Raspberry Pi, which I occasionally build the image on and see if it works.

Q: How do I proxy this with NGINX?

A: See :ref:`here <setup-nginx>`.

Q: How do I get WebSocket support with Apache mod_wsgi?

A: mod_wsgi by itself does not support ASGI. Paperless will continue to work with WSGI, but certain features such as status notifications about document consumption won't be available.

If you want to continue using mod_wsgi, you will have to run an ASGI-enabled web server as well that processes WebSocket connections, and configure Apache to redirect WebSocket connections to this server. Multiple options for ASGI servers exist:

  • gunicorn with uvicorn as the worker implementation (the default of paperless)
  • daphne as a standalone server, which is the reference implementation for ASGI.
  • uvicorn as a standalone server