Paperless-ngx
A pile of paper becomes a searchable digital archive under Paperless-ngx, the
community-maintained document management system. The pipeline is what makes it work: drop a
file into the consumption folder (or let it poll an email inbox), and a worker hashes it for
duplicate detection, routes it by type, runs OCRmyPDF with Tesseract (100+ languages) on
anything without a text layer, and produces an archivable PDF/A with invisible selectable text
embedded - so Ctrl+F works on your scans. Then the smart part: a scikit-learn classifier
(TF-IDF plus multi-label prediction) trained on your own tagged documents automatically
assigns tags, correspondents, and document types to new arrivals, alongside rule-based exact,
keyword, and regex matching for deterministic cases. Full-text search includes relevance
ranking, match highlighting, autocomplete, and "more like this" similarity search. Apache Tika
integration extends consumption to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and LibreOffice formats. The
Django/Angular app adds custom fields, saved views on a customizable dashboard, bulk editing,
workflow automation triggered on upload or matching, shareable public links with expiration,
and a robust permissions system with per-document access control. Metadata lives in PostgreSQL
with Redis-queued Celery workers processing documents in parallel. Your tax records, invoices,
and contracts stay on your server - searchable in seconds, never in someone else's cloud.
Deploy