Paperless-Ngx v2.0.0 (opens in new tab)

There was a pretty big discussion about paperless-ngx a couple of months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37800951 (183 comments)

I tested it out then and am considering migrating from my current system (Google Drive) to using a self-hosted approach. Paperless seems to have a good approach for minimizing the mental overhead of ingesting and categorizing new documents - which is what ultimately leads me to stacking documents up for months before processing them. My initial pilot run was promising, but I haven't gotten around to switching yet.

From the changelog, it's not really clear to me what's notable about this release, especially as a new/potential user.

This page is a better introduction to the product, although it doesn't mention the v2 release yet:

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

If anyone is looking to kick the tires of Paperless NGX quickly, check out my little pet project [1] for running it with Podman. I use it every week to scan papers from my Brother ADS2800w which will SFTP the PDFs into a directory for Paperless NGX to consume.

I just updated my install to v2.0.0 with a simple podman pull and a systemctl restart of my paperless pod and everything looks great. Hats off to the contributors of the project. Every update, even major ones like this have been really smooth.

1: https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx

I love paperless-ngx but I wish it had a rotate button. Some of my document scans are upside down.

I wish paperless-ngx included native advertising to printers for the "Sent to PC" feature.

Last I checked it doesn't and had to run a separate service to advertise to the printer the paperless endpoint.

I haven't been using it too much yet but I am really impressed by paperless-ngx so far. It just works(TM) and the auto-tagging functionality is surprisingly good, even with just a few documents in it.

Does anyone have a good scanner recommendation though? I am eyeing the Brother ADS-1700W since it seems to be recommended often, but I would really like to use the "scan to webhook" feature (it's 2023 after all) instead of SMTP or whatever else are the options I would have with the Brother.

Paperless-ngx + ScanSnap iX1600. Works with a samba share that is very easy to set up in Linux these days. Fast, easy, and you can have different scan profiles to set the destination folder. Push a button for the type and a button to scan. Paperless-ngx automatically files and tags reliably. It is saving me hours per week in filing. Can't recommend it enough. This is a personal system -- not sure how it would scale to 100k - 1M+.

Paperless is one of my favorite pieces of software. A few years ago I got fed up with my filing cabinet full of folders & tons of documents that didn't quite fit into any of the categories.

I installed Paperless on my home server & spent a night digitizing everything. After being comfortable with it for a few months I went back & shredded all my paper copies. Today my process is similar - when I get a document I would normally toss in that filing cabinet I just scan, upload to Paperless, and shred it. It's also really nice for storing large purchase receipts - I've previously had the writing on thermal paper receipts go invisible after a period of time, no longer an issue.

Searching for something specific is so easy now! Huge QOL improvement. Just make sure you have a solid backup strategy, losing my Paperless database & filestore would be devastating.

Just curiosity... What does "ngx" mean in this context?

To me it means Angular (the web framework). So, I was surprised to learn this wasn't an Angular plugin. Angular is often referred to as ng for short and as such their plugins tend to have ngx as a prefix. For example, the angular wrapper for ChartJS is ngx-chartjs.

I set up paperless-ngx w/ a scanner attached to my nas and a bit of scripting to get the scan button working a while back, but then forgot about it.

For me, as someone who wants my docs on my own server, but well, doesn't care enough to want to constantly keep up with forks/changes/migration/updates, I've been looking for just something stable I can use for years (or maybe decades?, eg part of the appeal of something like Obisidian is that it just falls back to .md text files).

Curious if there are any long-term active users of this (or other systems) for handling all their paper and what they think about maintainability/longevity?

I am in the process of getting this running on a Kubernetes cluster in my home. That’s where I throw all self-hosted containerised applications these days. But there’s a bit of friction.

Their entrypoint script makes a lot of assumptions and in their docker-compose example they use a single container running supervisord instead of multiple containers, each with a dedicated purpose (ingestion, consuming, web server). The setup is almost insistent on logging to a file instead of stdout. It also checks and tries to modify permissions of some folders(!!). This requires quite a bit of unpicking.

This is doable, but not frictionless to get it to do what I consider “best practices” but I understand that it’s probably a mix of “easy for someone who’s day job is not to be an infrastructure engineer” and “we were using supervisord for baremetal anyway”. Maybe a lot of it is personal preference but I do feel like the project is not taking containerisation fully to heart. Maybe being more user-friendly in their eyes is more important than being a containerisation purist.

Either way, I’ve got it nearly working with my Brother ADS-1700W, which has shortcuts for me, my wife, and “joint”, which uploads documents to different directories via SFTP which then automatically have their paperless-ngx owner set appropriately.

I finally switched from my ancient Mayan EDMS running an outdated version on an Ubuntu 16.04 VM that I couldn’t upgrade because the Mayan docs for that version are not available anymore. I’m not a huge user but I shred everything I can and have around 1000 documents.

I have zero regrets so far. Paperless ngx is so much more user friendly, the automatic date extraction from OCR, the auto tagging and document type classification, and the ease to backup and restore sold me. I highly recommend it.

I recently migrated from another (more "enterprisey") open-source EDMS system that shall remain unnamed to paperless-ngx. Can't praise this high enough. Where the other system needed multiple clicks for the easiest things and had a bunch of UI antifeatures, paperless has a very intuitive and well thought-out UI and handles ~30k documents without issues.

Has any paperless user found a good way to "deskew" scanned pages? Sometimes, when scanning from my Brother printer through the ADF, the pages are skewed/rotated and it can be pretty jarring.

I'd love for this to be able to use something like s3 as a backend and (tax) audit prove archiving.