Paperless-ngx: the self-hosted document manager
Turn a pile of PDFs and scans into a searchable, tagged archive. What Paperless-ngx is, what it is known for, and how to run it.
Paperless-ngx ingests your documents — scans, PDFs, photos of receipts — reads the text with OCR, tags them intelligently, and makes the whole lot searchable. It is the self-hosted answer to a drawer full of paper that you can actually find things in.
What it is
A document management system (the maintained successor of Paperless and Paperless-ng) that watches an "consume" folder, or takes uploads, and files everything into a searchable archive with automatic tagging.
What it does
OCR — reads text out of scans and images so they become searchable ("find the invoice from March with 'domain renewal' in it").
Automatic tagging and correspondents — rules and learned patterns assign tags, correspondents and document types as documents arrive.
Full-text search across everything, including inside scanned PDFs.
Consume folder + email — drop files in, or forward emails into it, and it files them automatically.
Saved views and a clean web UI to browse by date, tag, correspondent or type.
What it is known for
Making paper disappear. It is the go-to self-hosted tool for going paperless — receipts, bills, contracts, warranty documents, letters.
Strong OCR + search — the combination people actually want from a document archive.
Active development and a large, helpful community.
Why use it
Find any document in seconds instead of hunting through folders or drawers.
Private by design — financial and personal documents stay on your server, not in someone's cloud.
Automate filing so you stop manually naming and sorting files.
One archive for household or small-business paperwork, backed up on your terms.
Where and how
A 2 vCPU, 2–4 GB VPS handles a household or small office; give it storage for the archive and OCR is CPU-heavy during ingestion (fine on a small box, just a little slower). Deploy the Docker Compose stack (web + Redis + PostgreSQL + a document store), put it behind TLS, then start dropping documents into the consume folder.
Back it up properly — the database and the media/documents directory — to somewhere off the server; this is exactly the kind of archive you cannot recreate. See /app-hosting/paperlessngx and Backups that actually save you.