Easily Manage And Search All Of Your Documents - Paperless-NGX

Improve your document management game with Paperless-ngx. It's a clever tool that allows you search, tag, version control and much more across all of your documents (including searching images!). There's also a great mobile app for managing on the move.
This video shows a Docker Compose deployment with Single Sign On and Reverse Proxy using Traefik.
Docker Files:
github.com/JamesTurland/JimsG...
Paperless Documentation:
docs.paperless-ngx.com/
Recommended Hardware: github.com/JamesTurland/JimsG...
Support this channel to get access to perks:
/ @jims-garage
Discord: / discord
Twitter: / jimsgarage_
Reddit: / jims-garage
GitHub: github.com/JamesTurland/JimsG...
00:00 - Introduction to Paperless-NGX
01:32 - Docker Config Review
07:30 - Authentik SSO
11:30 - Deploying Containers
12:30 - Paperless-NGX Web GUI & SSO
14:28 - Brief Overview of How To Use
19:03 - Outro

[@hpbingham]

I’m a simple a man. I see a video from Jim’s Garage, I watch it. Jim deploys Paperless in his homelab. I deploy Paperless in my homelab. …on a serious note, thank you so much. I started my homelab journey two weeks ago, and your content has been absolutely invaluable. Don’t change a thing about what you do and how you do it. You should be really proud of your channel.

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, I really appreciate your support and feedback - hit that subscribe ;)

[@markandrow4010]

Thanks, Useful and excellent, especially the detailed documentation in Docker with Traefik,

[@Jims-Garage]

Glad it was helpful!

[@KarimiSolomon]

Awesome Vid as always!

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks 👍

[@WillHung]

I like your videos. Your delivery is clear and to the point.

[@Jims-Garage]

I appreciate that!

[@WillHung]

@@Jims-Garage Would you be able to make a tutorial on bind9 or some other selfhosted dns solutions?

[@Jims-Garage]

@@WillHung check out my unbound and PiHole videos

[@nowanilfideme2]

No comments yet? Underrated channel. Anyways, this is one of the most useful parts planned for my home server setup. Home Assistant and Octoprint are the other two main ones (already running). But I feel like I need a proper NAS instead of RPi 4 + external SSD to trust it with my files! :)

[@BrianThomas]

I've deployed this in my home and wow. What a life saver this has been. I would advise on a word of caution. If you're going to deploy this in your home. Please create a backup from within the application of your data. Things happen and VM's, LXC's, or docker containers crash. It's easy to spin them up, but if you have a few months or more of data that you've scanned in. All of that will be lost. I've seen some KZbin's create a separate DB for service's like this. It's good but it's overkill for a home user. If you're doing a lab for educational purposes then yes that would be understandable.

[@BrianThomas]

I guess you can backup the entire instance in Proxmox. They make that very easy to do as well, but I found it just as easy from within the application. Either way backup, backup, backup..

[@Glatze603]

Very good application for getting a paperless homelab! Thanks for your time making this video Jim. I switched a year ago from ecoDMS and my result is: Paperless NGX is much better concerning functionality and usability (and it is open source and free). For homelab it is the first choise!

[@Jims-Garage]

Great, glad to hear it

[@philippemiller4740]

I really like your videos. I'd suggest doing the demo that you do at the end of your video in introduction to get the attention of the viewers and let them understand if they want to use this application or not.

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, that's a good point.

[@FrancescoCarucci]

Thx for the video. I started using paperless a year ago for all my documents and it's been a gamechanger.

[@Jims-Garage]

That's great to hear, have you had any issues?

[@FrancescoCarucci]

@@Jims-Garage Once set up in docker compose, pretty much the same as your setup, smooth as silk. I set up a cron job to docker compose down and up at midnight to update every day. I handle all the documents in the family (including highly sensitive). The next improvements will be adding authentik following your instructions and doing some encryption at rest.

[@hyperprotagonist]

Great video. Now to deploy with ansible… no more vscode server connections 😊

[@georgebobolas6363]

Thanks Jim! Another cool thing to try out 🙂

[@Jims-Garage]

Any time!

[@MarcMcMillin]

Thanks Jim 🙂 This will be great in my homelab

[@Jims-Garage]

Perfect!

[@danielstellmon5330]

This project makes me want to buy a scanner.

[@Jims-Garage]

Haha, definitely!

[@toddselby443]

Most smart phones cameras can be used as a scanner.

[@danielstellmon5330]

@toddselby443 you are correct, but for large volumes of documents, like my back log of legal documents, I'd rather have a scanner.

[@toddselby443]

@@danielstellmon5330 Sure that makes sense.

[@_ytuser]

Many thanks, Jim. That is very valuable information, to me. 🍀💌

[@Jims-Garage]

Glad it was helpful!

[@starmountpictures]

Just beautiful - thank you!!!

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks 👍

[@jlsuncin]

I already use Calibre to organize my books, so I wonder if it's possible to combine them

[@DavidAshwell]

Clear and concise video, thank you. Quick question, does your document library need to be uploaded to the container, or can you point this container at a location across your network (say a nfs mount, etc.) and let it ingest your documents where they currently reside?

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks. You should be able to map the media and consume folders to the NFS share.

[@DavidAshwell]

@@Jims-Garage Thank you

[@cesarkollenphowet]

and what if i want to print 😂 ? is there like a printer server like savapage but modern and dockerized?

[@w7oshy]

can be used on windows server and shared with other users ?

[@1xXNimrodXx1]

What document scanner would you suggest, they are pretty expensive tho.

[@Jims-Garage]

Depends, I usually use it for PDF. Physical scanning I have a basic Lexmark all in one

[@monish05m]

Another amazing video, thankyou. One question, totally unrelated to this video, what would you recommend for self hosted file sharing other than nextcloud.

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks 👍 depends, just sharing or collaboration as well?

[@msiloo]

Hey Jim. Thanks for all the Tutorials. Somehow when deploying the docker compose it is not starting properly. The logs of the postgres container show „no Space left on device“, so it cannot create the files it requires. I cannot figure out the issue. I only run Traefik and vaultwarden on the docker vm and followed your Tutorial. Appreciate the help.

[@Jims-Garage]

Run df -h on your Docker host. Check there's enough free space.

[@NoOne-qd2yp]

Can Paperless-NGX be installed online?

[@Jims-Garage]

Yes, you can port forward it

[@NoOne-qd2yp]

@@Jims-Garage Wow! And thank you for your respond. It is much appreciated.

[@Jims-Garage]

@@NoOne-qd2yp recommend something like Traefik with letsencrypt and crowdsec and put it behind a Cloudflare proxy. I have videos on all of these things. (You can also add Authentik if you wish).

[@RupertoCamarena]

O got Server Error (500) wehn i Click sso 😢

[@SerialkillerinTraining]

So you play Warhammer?

[@Jims-Garage]

At this point in time I have bought and painted some, playing would be an over statement 😂

[@billycroan2336]

I have scanned in every document I possessed for the last 20 years. I wrote a set of scripts using ocrmypdf to rename them usefully, and put them in a hierarchical directory structure. No app, no running software after they're processed. I search them using gnome nautilus. Friends have told me about paperless but I am horrified to see how slow it was to import. Do you think that's due to the extra layers in docker? I'd love to have the web app and Android app. But I've got 130k documents to import and I'm only going to be alive for 60 more years.

[@jorgemtds]

webserver?... that's no longer an application. It's a service.

[@Jims-Garage]

Depends where you come from. Nginx is an application, but it also provides a service. You can patch an application, not a service.

[@ElDubsNZ]

What I don't like about paperless is the lack of data portability. All that clever information it's storing cannot easily be pulled and transferred to a competitor if you want to switch services. Data portability is make or break for me in every self-host I do. Audiobookshelf/Jellyfin stores all metadata next to the files, I can export bitwarden to json. I'd like if paperless organised my PDFs into folders, then placed all metadata right there with it in a open standard format that other apps can work with.

[@ThiesBroetje]

You can easily manage that by using storage paths, there you can configure how your pdfs are stored on disk and how they are named.

[@ElDubsNZ]

@@ThiesBroetje That solves the issue of everything being in one folder, but you still lose all the metadata created by paperless, like OCR.

[@ThiesBroetje]

@@ElDubsNZ for that you can export directly from db or use the document_exporter function, to get it in a json-format. You could also write a simple Django-management-command if the other options don’t suit your needs. The data is not obfuscated in any way and you can do anything with it.

[@ElDubsNZ]

@@ThiesBroetje You can, but that's quite janky and clearly not made to be an easy way to do it, nor is it much of a widely accepted format, it's just a way to get your data out, which is different from the concept of data portability, which is a way of easily transferring your data from one app to another.

[@ThiesBroetje]

@@ElDubsNZ there is nothing janky about that. What kind of standard do you have in mind, please name it, because I cannot think of anything. There are a lot of different types of metadata in paperless, that are not defined in the pdf-standard for which you would need a custom metadata container, that’s also not really useful if there are no application that can interface with it.

[@nononononoo689]

red-is not read-is

[@Jims-Garage]

That's fighting talk, I don't see a 'dd' 😉

[@nononononoo689]

@@Jims-Garage how do you say 'red'? :) quick reply, brill channel. keep it up!

[@Jims-Garage]

@@nononononoo689 thanks, this calls for a poll!

[@ThinkAboutIT-Channel]

useless

[@Jims-Garage]

Your comment, or is that self reflection?

[@ThinkAboutIT-Channel]

​@@Jims-Garage Obviously your video! The truth always hurts, hence you felt the inner burn to "retaliate"! :)))))

[@Jims-Garage]

@@ThinkAboutIT-Channel on the contrary, I don't seek validation of my videos. I'm more interested in improving the content for others but it's difficult when people leave such detailed feedback 😂

[@ThinkAboutIT-Channel]

@@Jims-Garage Ok, you convinced me! :D