How to Deploy Paperless-ngx: Go Paperless in 30 Minutes

Paperless-ngx digitises your business documents through optical character recognition and makes them searchable. Invoices, receipts, contracts, and correspondence go from paper to searchable archive with a scanner and 30 minutes of setup.

Step 1: Create the Docker Compose File

services:
  paperless-broker:
    image: redis:7
    container_name: paperless-broker
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - redis_data:/data

  paperless-db:
    image: postgres:16
    container_name: paperless-db
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - pg_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: paperless
      POSTGRES_USER: paperless
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: secure_password_here

  paperless-webserver:
    image: ghcr.io/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx:latest
    container_name: paperless-webserver
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:8083:8000"
    volumes:
      - ./data:/usr/src/paperless/data
      - ./media:/usr/src/paperless/media
      - ./export:/usr/src/paperless/export
      - ./consume:/usr/src/paperless/consume
    environment:
      PAPERLESS_REDIS: redis://paperless-broker:6379
      PAPERLESS_DBHOST: paperless-db
      PAPERLESS_DBUSER: paperless
      PAPERLESS_DBPASS: secure_password_here
      PAPERLESS_DBNAME: paperless
      PAPERLESS_SECRET_KEY: generate_a_random_50_char_string
      PAPERLESS_URL: https://docs.yourdomain.com
      PAPERLESS_TIME_ZONE: Asia/Brunei
      PAPERLESS_OCR_LANGUAGES: eng msa
      PAPERLESS_OCR_MODE: auto
    depends_on:
      - paperless-broker
      - paperless-db

volumes:
  redis_data:
  pg_data:

Step 2: Create the Admin User

Start the containers and create an admin account:

docker compose up -d
docker compose exec paperless-webserver python3 manage.py \
  createsuperuser

Enter the admin username, email, and password when prompted. Open https://docs.yourdomain.com and log in.

Step 3: Configure Automatic Consumption

Paperless-ngx watches the consume folder for new files. Any file placed in this folder is automatically processed. Configure your scanner to save files to this folder via Samba, FTP, or WebDAV.

For a network scanner:

# Configure Samba on the server
sudo apt install samba -y
sudo tee -a /etc/samba/smb.conf << EOF
[paperless]
path = /opt/paperless-ngx/consume
read only = no
browsable = yes
EOF
sudo systemctl restart smbd
sudo smbpasswd -a paperless

Configure your scanner to save to \\your-server-ip\paperless. Every scan is automatically ingested, OCR'd, and added to your archive.

Step 4: Configure Email Ingestion

Paperless-ngx can watch an email inbox and automatically ingest attachments. This is useful for invoices that arrive by email:

# Add to paperless-webserver environment:
PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_MAIL_HOST: imap.yourdomain.com
PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_MAIL_PORT: 993
PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_MAIL_USERNAME: docs@yourdomain.com
PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_MAIL_PASSWORD: your_email_password
PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_MAIL_INBOX: INBOX

Forward invoices and receipts to docs@yourdomain.com. They appear in Paperless-ngx automatically.

Step 5: Train the Auto-Tagger

Paperless-ngx learns from your tagging patterns. For the first week, manually tag incoming documents with correspondents, document types, and tags. After about 50 documents, the auto-classifier becomes accurate enough to tag documents automatically. The accuracy improves with every document you process.

The automation saves hours per month compared to manual filing and hours per search compared to digging through physical folders.

If setting up Samba shares and training ML classifiers is not how you want to spend your Tuesday, VPS1 deploys Paperless-ngx with automatic ingestion. We configure your scanner, email ingestion, and backup. You search, find, and never dig through a filing cabinet again.