Paperless-ngx is a community-supported document management system designed to replace physical paper archives with a searchable digital repository. Built as the official successor to Paperless and Paperless-ng, it combines Django backend, Angular frontend, and OCR technology to convert scanned documents into indexed, taggable, and searchable files. This tool is ideal for individuals, small businesses, or home users who need to digitize tax records, invoices, contracts, and other sensitive paperwork while maintaining control over their data. Unlike cloud-based alternatives, Paperless-ngx runs entirely on your own infrastructure, ensuring privacy and data sovereignty.
The system automatically processes incoming documents via OCR (using Tesseract), extracts text, classifies them using machine learning models, and organizes them with tags, custom metadata, and thumbnails. With Docker-based deployment and an intuitive web interface, users can quickly set up a personal document archive without relying on third-party services.
What You Get
- OCR-powered text extraction - Uses Tesseract OCR to extract searchable text from scanned PDFs, images, and other document formats, enabling full-text search across all uploaded documents.
- Automatic document classification - Machine learning models automatically assign document types (e.g., invoice, receipt) and suggest tags based on content patterns.
- Docker-based deployment - Easy setup via pre-configured docker-compose.yml files and an automated install script that handles all dependencies.
- Web-based document interface - A responsive Angular frontend with advanced filtering, tagging, and sorting to manage large document collections visually.
- Built-in document indexing - All documents are indexed for fast search by content, filename, date, tags, or custom metadata fields.
- Migration support from Paperless-ng - Seamless migration path with compatible data formats, allowing users to drop in the new image without re-scanning documents.
- Multi-language support - Translations managed via Crowdin, with UI available in over 20 languages for global users.
Common Use Cases
- Building a personal tax and invoice archive - Home users scan monthly bills, receipts, and tax forms to create a searchable digital vault accessible from any device without cloud dependency.
- Creating a legal document repository for small firms - Law offices or paralegals use Paperless-ngx to archive client contracts, court filings, and correspondence with full-text search for rapid retrieval.
- Problem: Losing physical documents → Solution: Digitize and index everything - Users scan old paper records, then use the search function to instantly find a 2018 utility bill by typing ‘electricity’ or the account number, eliminating manual file searching.
- Team workflow for document-heavy departments - Accounting or HR teams use Paperless-ngx to centralize employee records, vendor invoices, and compliance documents with role-based access and tagging for audit readiness.
Under The Hood
Paperless-NGX is a modern, open-source document management system designed to automate the ingestion, processing, and organization of digital documents. It provides a comprehensive solution for handling diverse document formats while offering extensibility through plugin architectures and intelligent indexing capabilities.
Architecture
The system adopts a monolithic architecture with clear separation between frontend and backend components, ensuring maintainability through layered design. Key architectural elements include dependency injection, strategy patterns for document parsing, and middleware for authentication and logging.
- The system is organized into distinct modules that handle document processing, user management, and integration with external services
- Design patterns such as strategy and dependency injection are used to decouple core functionality from specific implementations
- Django signals enable modular plugin integration, allowing components like barcode detection or LLM indexing to hook into consumption and update flows
Tech Stack
The project leverages a modern web stack combining Python backend services with a TypeScript frontend, ensuring robust performance and scalability.
- Built primarily with Python and Django as the core web framework, complemented by an Angular-based TypeScript frontend
- Relies on Django REST Framework for API development and integrates with PostgreSQL and MariaDB databases
- Employs Docker for containerization, pre-commit hooks, linting tools, and supports multiple database configurations via Docker Compose
- Extensive use of Django’s test suite and frontend testing capabilities, with CI/CD workflows powered by GitHub Actions
Code Quality
The codebase emphasizes quality assurance with comprehensive test coverage and consistent error handling practices across multiple layers.
- Comprehensive testing strategies are implemented across both backend and frontend, ensuring reliability through extensive test suites
- Error handling is systematically applied with clear patterns and appropriate exception management throughout the system
- Code consistency is maintained through established conventions and style guides, though some legacy components show signs of technical debt
- Linting and CI/CD pipelines are configured to enforce code standards and automate quality checks
What Makes It Unique
Paperless-NGX distinguishes itself through innovative integration patterns and extensibility features that support enterprise-grade document workflows.
- A modular plugin architecture uses Django signals to decouple document processing logic, enabling flexible integration of features like barcode detection or LLM indexing
- Smart search capabilities dynamically sync with document changes, supporting both full-text and metadata-based searches through a flexible indexing strategy
- An extensible tagging system supports complex regex-based mappings and ASN-based document separation, ideal for enterprise or high-volume environments
- S6 overlay integration in Docker deployments ensures robust service initialization and graceful handling of connectivity issues during startup