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Paperless-NGX

Paperless-NGX

David Buhlman

• 2 min read
Paperless-NGX
Photo by Dimitri Karastelev / Unsplash

I came across Paperless and wish I had found this years and years ago. Document management with built in OCR capabilities? Shut the front door! Man I need to get this running right now! It looks like a current fork that is still being worked on is called Paperless-NGX so I'll start there.

Create Virtual Machine

I don't find any documented system requirements beyond some software packages. So I log in to Windows Admin Center and connect to HV-03. I create a new virtual machine and name it PAPERLESS-01. I give it 2 vCPUs and 4GB of memory to start with and a 30GB virtual disk. I imagine it ultimately might need more than 4GB of memory, but I can always increase that later as I need to. I mount my Ubuntu 22.04 ISO and set the secure boot template to Microsoft UEFI Certificate Authority

Install Operating System

I follow through the Ubuntu installation wizard, and while it is working I go back to Windows Admin Center and connect to DC-02. I add the following A record: PAPERLESS.domain.local > 10.10.10.XXX.

Install Paperless-NGX Prerequisites

Steps performed on PAPERLESS-01
They recommend using Docker so that's where I'll start.

  • sudo apt install docker
  • sudo apt install docker-compose

Install Paperless-NGX

Steps performed on PAPERLESS-01

  • bash -c "$(curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/main/install-paperless-ngx.sh)"
    • WARN: It looks like the current user does not have Docker permissions.
    • WARN: Use 'sudo usermod -aG docker david' to assign Docker permissions to the user.
  • sudo usermod -aG docker david
  • bash -c "$(curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/main/install-paperless-ngx.sh)"
    • docker.errors.DockerException: Error while fetching server API version:('Connection aborted.', PermissionError(13, 'Permission denied'))

It looks like I also need to be added to the docker group.

  • sudo gpassword -a $USER docker
  • bash -c "$(curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/main/install-paperless-ngx.sh)"

Success! Testing shows the app is active at http://paperless.domain.local:8000. Cool, that's all the time I have to put to this today so I'll come back tomorrow to work on it some more.