Papermerge OSS

Papermerge OSS (Open Source) is a document management system for scanned documents, with OCR, full-text search, tags, folders, and a desktop-like web UI.

Status: Actively maintained by the community maintainer team. Originally created by Eugen Ciur, who now focuses on Papermerge Cloud (SaaS).

• 🛠️ Want to contribute? See CONTRIBUTING.md
• 🐛 Found a bug or have a feature idea? Open an issue
• 💬 Questions or ideas? Join the Discussions

Note: This repository is the open-source, self-hosted, community-maintained edition. Papermerge Cloud (SaaS) is a separate managed service with its own codebase. The two do not share code, so features and release schedules may differ.

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Papermerge OSS (Open Source) is designed to work with scanned documents (also called digital archives). It extracts text from your scans using OCR, indexes them, and prepares them for full-text search. It provides the look and feel of modern desktop file browsers. It has features like dual-panel document browser, drag and drop, tags, hierarchical folders and full-text search so that you can efficiently store and organize your documents.

It supports PDF, TIFF, JPEG and PNG, and is a perfect tool for long-term storage of your documents.

Feature Highlights

• Web UI with desktop-like experience
• OpenAPI-compliant REST API
• Works with PDF, JPEG, PNG and TIFF documents
• Document versioning
• Tags - assign colored tags to documents or folders
• Documents and folders - users can organize documents in folders
• Document types (i.e. categories)
• Custom fields (metadata) per document type
• Multi-user
• Group ownership
• Share documents and folders between users and/or groups of users
• UI is available in multiple languages
• Page management - delete, reorder, cut, move, extract pages
• OCR (Optical Character Recognition) of the documents
• OCRed text overlay (you can download documents with an OCRed text overlay)
• Full-text search of the scanned documents

Docker Setup

To start Papermerge OSS (Open Source) with the most basic setup, use the following command:

docker run -p 8000:80 \
    -e PAPERMERGE__SECURITY__SECRET_KEY=abc \
    -e PAPERMERGE__AUTH__PASSWORD=123 \
    papermerge/papermerge:3.5.3

The secret key and password above are for a quick local try-out only. Replace them with your own values for any real deployment.

For more info about various deployment scenarios, check the documentation page.

Development

Want to run Papermerge OSS (Open Source) from source? The development setup (PostgreSQL, environment variables, backend and frontend, running tests, CLI commands like uv run pm search build, pre-commit hooks) and the contribution workflow are described in CONTRIBUTING.md.