Paperless-ngx is an open-source document management system that converts scans and PDFs into a fully searchable archive using Tesseract OCR, with tags, custom fields, and automated processing rules. This guide deploys Paperless-ngx using Docker Compose with PostgreSQL, Redis, and Traefik handling automatic HTTPS, then uploads a document and verifies OCR extraction. By the end, you'll have Paperless-ngx serving an OCR-indexed document archive securely at your domain.

Set Up the Directory Structure

1. Create the project directories:

$ mkdir -p ~/paperless-ngx/{data,media,export,consume,pgdata}

$ cd ~/paperless-ngx