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shamoon c431370bde Update setup.md

2026-02-24 15:11:21 -08:00

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title
Setup

Installation

!!! tip "Quick Start"

If you just want Paperless-ngx running quickly, use our installation script:
```shell-session
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](https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/blob/main/install-paperless-ngx.sh) 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](usage.md#superusers) 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{:target="_blank"}.
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{:target="_blank"}.

Installation

Go to the /docker/compose directory on the project page{:target="_blank"} 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.
```
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
```
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`](configuration.md#PAPERLESS_DBUSER)
can be set using `PAPERLESS_DBUSER_FILE=/var/run/secrets/password.txt`.
```
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.
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 currently 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, make this change in docker-compose.yml:

Set the user running the container to map to the paperless user in the container. This value (user_id below) should be the same ID that USERMAP_UID and USERMAP_GID are set to in docker-compose.env. See USERMAP_UID and USERMAP_GID here.

Your entry for Paperless should contain something like:

webserver:
  image: ghcr.io/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx:latest
  user: <user_id>

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. Use PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_POLLING to enable polling and disable inotify. See here.

Bare Metal Install

Prerequisites

Paperless runs on Linux only, Windows is not supported.
Python 3 is required with versions 3.10 - 3.12 currently supported. Newer versions may work, but some dependencies may not be fully compatible.

Installation

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 handling encrypted documents
- 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
```
Install redis >= 6.0 and configure it to start automatically.

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](https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/JSON1Extension) is
enabled. This is usually the case, but not always.

Create a system user with a new home folder in which you want to run Paperless-ngx.
```
adduser paperless --system --home /opt/paperless --group
```
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).

Optional: If you cloned the Git repository, you will need to compile the frontend yourself. See here and use the build step, not serve.
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 Redis server, such as redis://localhost:6379.
- PAPERLESS_DBENGINE is optional, and should be one of postgres, mariadb, or sqlite
- 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 Redis instance [is secured](https://redis.io/docs/latest/operate/oss_and_stack/management/security/).
```
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
```

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`.

Go to /opt/paperless/src and execute the following command:

# This creates the database schema.
sudo -Hu paperless python3 manage.py migrate

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.
```

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 Redis and optionally the database server, but don't need to be started in any particular order. The example files depend on Redis being started. If you use a database server, you should add additional dependencies.

!!! note

For instructions on using a reverse proxy,
[see the wiki](https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/wiki/Using-a-Reverse-Proxy-with-Paperless-ngx#).

!!! 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`

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.

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

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. See documentation for details on moving data from SQLite to PostgreSQL. Both work fine with Paperless. 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 message broker instance. 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:

Stop Paperless.

cd /path/to/current/paperless
docker compose down

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.

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

``` shell-session
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.

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.
Adjust docker-compose.yml and docker-compose.env to your needs. See Docker setup for details on which edits are recommended.
Follow the update procedure in Update paperless.
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.
Start Paperless-ngx.
```
docker compose up -d
```
This will run Paperless-ngx in the background and automatically start it on system boot.
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.
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.

Stop and remove the Paperless container.
If using an external database, stop that container.
Update Redis configuration.
1. If REDIS_URL is already set, change it to PAPERLESS_REDIS and continue to step 4.
2. Otherwise, add a new Redis service in docker-compose.yml, following the example compose files
3. Set the environment variable PAPERLESS_REDIS so it points to the new Redis container.
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.
Update configuration paths.
1. Set the environment variable PAPERLESS_DATA_DIR to /config.
Update media paths.
1. Set the environment variable PAPERLESS_MEDIA_ROOT to /data/media.
Update timezone.
1. Set the environment variable PAPERLESS_TIME_ZONE to the same value as TZ.
Modify image: to point to ghcr.io/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx:latest or a specific version if preferred.
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 skip and consider OCRing your documents before feeding them into Paperless. Some scanners are able to do this!
Set PAPERLESS_OCR_SKIP_ARCHIVE_FILE to with_text to skip archive file generation for already OCRed documents, or always to skip it for all documents.
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](advanced_usage.md#automatic-matching) 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.

28 KiB Raw Blame History

Installation

Overview

Installation Script

Prerequisites

Run the installation script

After installation

Docker Compose Install

Prerequisites

Installation

After installation

Optional Advanced Compose Configurations

Bare Metal Install

Prerequisites

Installation

After installation

Build the Docker image yourself

Migrating to Paperless-ngx

Migrating from Paperless-ng

Migrating from Paperless

Migrating from LinuxServer.io Docker Image

Running Paperless-ngx on less powerful devices

Additional considerations

28 KiB

Raw Blame History