Paperless-ngx

A community-supported open-source document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can keep, well, less paper.

Website | Source

Get Started

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

Docker Compose 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.

Tags: tool   documents   knowledge base   ai  

Last modified 15 April 2026