Setup - Paperless-ngx
Author: the Paperless-ngx team
Description: Documentation for the Paperless-ngx document management system software.

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# Installation

Quick Start

If you just want Paperless-ngx running quickly, use our installation script:

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

If piping into a shell directly from the internet makes you nervous, inspect the script first!

## Overview

Choose the installation route that best fits your setup:

Route | Best for | Effort
--- | --- | ---
Installation script | Fastest first-time setup with guided prompts (recommended for most users) | Low
Docker Compose templates | Manual control over compose files and settings | Medium
Bare metal | Advanced setups, packaging, and development-adjacent workflows | High
Hosted providers (wiki) | Managed hosting options maintained by the community — check details carefully | Varies

For most users, Docker is the best option. It is faster to set up, easier to maintain, and ships with sensible defaults.

The bare-metal route gives you more control, but it requires manual installation and operation of all components. It is usually best suited for advanced users and contributors.

Info

Because superuser accounts have full access to all objects and documents, you may want to create a separate user account for daily use, or "downgrade" your superuser account to a normal user account after setup.

## Installation Script

Paperless-ngx provides an interactive script for Docker Compose setups. It asks a few configuration questions, then creates the required files, pulls the image, starts the containers, and creates your superuser account. In short, it automates the Docker Compose setup described below.

#### Prerequisites

- Docker and Docker Compose must be installed.
- macOS users will need GNU sed with support for running as `sed` as well as wget.

#### Run the installation script

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

#### After installation

Paperless-ngx should be available at `http://127.0.0.1:8000` (or similar, depending on your configuration) and you will be able to login with the credentials you provided during the installation script.

## Docker Compose Install

#### Prerequisites

- Docker and Docker Compose must be installed.

#### Installation

1. Go to the /docker/compose directory on the project page and download one `docker-compose.*.yml` file for your preferred database backend. Save it in a local directory as `docker-compose.yml`. Also download `docker-compose.env` and `.env` into that 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.

2. Modify `docker-compose.yml` as needed. For example, you may want to change the paths for `consume`, `media`, and other 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 your local directory:

       - /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

3. Modify `docker-compose.env` with any configuration options you need. 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 values. This ensures both the container and the host user can write to the consumption directory. If your UID and GID are `1000` (the default for the first normal user on many systems), this usually works out of the box without 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`.

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

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

#### After installation

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.

#### Optional Advanced Compose Configurations

Rootless

Warning

It is 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, set `user:` in `docker-compose.yml` to the UID and GID of your host user (use `id -u` and `id -g` to find these values). The container process starts directly as that user with no internal privilege remapping. Any UID and GID is supported:

    webserver:
      image: ghcr.io/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx:latest
      user: '1000:1000'

Do not combine this with `USERMAP_UID` or `USERMAP_GID`, which are intended for the non-rootless case described in step 3.

File systems without inotify support (e.g. NFS)

Some file systems, such as NFS network shares, don't support file system notifications with `inotify`. When the consumption directory is on such a file system, Paperless-ngx will not pick up new files with the default configuration. Set `PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_POLLING_INTERVAL` to a positive number to enable polling and disable native filesystem notifications.

## Bare Metal Install

#### Prerequisites

- Paperless runs on Linux only, Windows is not supported.
- Python 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, or 3.14 is required. As a policy, Paperless-ngx aims to support at least the three most recent Python versions and drops support for versions as they reach end-of-life. Newer versions may work, but some dependencies may not be fully compatible.

#### Installation

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 decrypting GPG-encrypted email
   - `libpq-dev` for PostgreSQL
   - `libmagic-dev` for mime type detection
   - `mariadb-client` for MariaDB compile time
   - `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 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 a Redis-compatible broker (a current release of Valkey or Redis) and configure it to start automatically.

3. Optional: Install `postgresql` and configure a database, user, and password for Paperless-ngx. 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 in which you want to run Paperless-ngx.

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

5. Download a release archive from https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/releases. For example:

       curl -O -L https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/releases/download/vX.Y.Z/paperless-ngx-vX.Y.Z.tar.xz

   Extract the archive with

       tar -xf paperless-ngx-vX.Y.Z.tar.xz

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

   Note

   If you are updating an existing bare-metal installation rather than installing for the first time, see the bare metal update instructions instead -- extracting a new release on top of an old one can leave behind stale files from the previous version.

   Optional: If you cloned the Git repository, you will need to compile the frontend yourself. See here and use the `build` step, not `serve`.

6. Configure Paperless-ngx. See configuration for details. Edit the included `paperless.conf` and adjust the settings to your needs. Required settings for getting Paperless-ngx running are:

   - `PAPERLESS_REDIS` should point to your broker, such as `redis://localhost:6379`.
   - `PAPERLESS_DBENGINE` should be one of `postgresql`, `mariadb`, or `sqlite`. PostgreSQL and MariaDB users must set this explicitly.
   - `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 the folder that Paperless-ngx should watch for incoming documents. Likewise, `PAPERLESS_DATA_DIR` and `PAPERLESS_MEDIA_ROOT` define where Paperless-ngx stores its data. If needed, these can point 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.
   - Set `PAPERLESS_URL` if you are behind a reverse proxy. This should point to your domain. Please see configuration for more information.

   You can make many more adjustments, especially for OCR. The following options are recommended for most users: - 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 broker instance is secured.

7. Create the following directories if they do not already exist:

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

   Adjust these paths if you configured different folders. Then verify that the `paperless` user has write permissions:

       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 dependencies from `requirements.txt`.

       sudo -Hu paperless pip3 install -r requirements.txt

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

   Tip

   You can use a virtual environment if you prefer. If you do, you may need to adjust the example scripts for your virtual environment paths.

   Tip

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

10. Optional: Test that Paperless-ngx is working by running

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

    Then point your browser to `http://localhost:8000` if accessing from the same device on which Paperless-ngx 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. Set up systemd services to run Paperless-ngx 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. - The `taskqueue` script for background workers (document consumption, etc.). - The `scheduler` script for periodic tasks such as email checking.

    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 the broker and optionally the database server, but don't need to be started in any particular order. The example files depend on the broker 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 `sudo systemctl status paperless-task-queue.service` for `paperless-task-queue.service` and `paperless-scheduler.service`. You may need to change the path in the files. Example: `ExecStart=/opt/paperless/.local/bin/celery --app paperless worker --loglevel INFO`

12. 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-ngx 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" />

Optional: Install the jbig2enc encoder. This will reduce the size of generated PDF documents. You'll most likely need to compile this yourself, because this software has been patented until around 2017 and binary packages are not available for most distributions.

Optional: download the NLTK data 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.

#### After installation

Your Paperless-ngx instance should now be accessible at `http://localhost: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

Building the Docker image yourself is typically used for development, but it can also be used for production if you want to customize the image. See Building the Docker image in the development documentation.

## Migrating to Paperless-ngx

You can migrate to Paperless-ngx from Paperless-ng or from the original Paperless project.

Note

Upgrading an existing Paperless-ngx installation from v2 to v3 has its own breaking changes and required steps. See the v3 migration guide before upgrading.

### Migrating from Paperless-ng

Paperless-ngx is meant to be a drop-in replacement for Paperless-ng, and 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. For example, 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 and 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`, for example using: `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 section describes how to update an existing Paperless Docker installation. Keep these points in mind:

- Read the changelog and take note of breaking changes.
- Decide whether to stay on SQLite or migrate to PostgreSQL. Both work fine with Paperless-ngx. 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-compatible message broker instance (such as Valkey or Redis). 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 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. Create a backup for two reasons: if something goes wrong, you still have your data; and if you don't like paperless-ngx, you can switch back to Paperless.

3. Download the latest release of Paperless-ngx. You can either use the Docker Compose files from here or clone the repository to build the image yourself (see development docs). 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 volume names created by Paperless-ngx. However, if you notice 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 for details on which edits are recommended.

6. Follow the update procedure in 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-ngx will maintain the index automatically.

8. Start Paperless-ngx.

       docker compose up -d

   This will run Paperless-ngx in the background and automatically start it on system boot.

9. Paperless may have installed a permanent redirect to `admin/` in your browser. This redirect is still in place and prevents access to the new UI. Clear your browser cache 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 upgrade or large change, 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 that container.

3. Update broker configuration.

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

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

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

## Running Paperless-ngx on less powerful devices

Paperless runs on Raspberry Pi. Some tasks can be slow on lower-powered hardware, but a few settings can improve performance:

- 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 OCRs only 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 `auto` and consider OCRing your documents before feeding them into Paperless. Some scanners are able to do this!
- Set `PAPERLESS_ARCHIVE_FILE_GENERATION` to `never` to skip archive file generation entirely, saving disk space at the cost of in-browser PDF/A viewing.
- 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.

## Additional considerations

Using a reverse proxy with Paperless-ngx

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

Enhancing security

Please see the wiki for user-maintained documentation on configuring security tools like Fail2ban with Paperless-ngx.