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Paperless

Paperless-NGX document management.

Migrated to ansible collection

Use r_pufky.media.paperless_ngx.

Tip

  • The UID/GID should be set to a user/group that have access to your media. All media clients should run under the same user to run correctly.

Suggested Archival Use

Suggested Use (based on archivst recommendations):

  1. Document Types refer to the broad type of document in question. Is it a letter? Receipt? Bill? Every instance will be different, but this should be your broadest field. You just want to more of less get it in the ballpark. For example, my Receipts doctype holds receipts that I scan in, but it will also hold confirmations from my debtors that I paid a bill, or an email from Cash app that I sold Bitcoin.
  2. Correspondent refers to the person/organization you are communicating with in the document. A bill from your credit card would have Capital One as correspondent for example, while a copy of your W2 might go under IRS. Again, you can be broad here, as trying to narrow it down is going to drive you crazy.
  3. Tags are used to answer the below basic concepts:
  4. Who is it referring to? In my case, I have tags for myself, my wife, the kids, and the dogs. They are all the same color to easily denote that. Note that this is NOT the same as correspondent.
  5. What is it referring to? Is it related to your car loan? Is it related to your homes maintenance? Mark these tags in a different color to easily notice them.
  6. When is the information in this document relevant? Was it a bill from 2 years ago? Does it relate to your taxes for 2022? Personally, I make tags for the year it was received, as it makes it easier to sort. You can further break this down by month if needed.
  7. I also make tags for special categories that I need to track. For example, I have a tag for any documents that we'll need for our taxes in the coming year, or critical documents (birth certs, etc). This helps to further break it down.

Using Management Utilities

Login and switch to paperless user to run management utilities.

su - -s /bin/bash paperless
. /opt/paperless/src/{VERSION}/.venv/bin/activate
cd /opt/paperless/src/{VERSION}
python3 manage.py document_renamer

Reduce PDF size

This will enable you to reduce pdf size if needed. Use the following settings for specific resolutions:

  • /screen 72dpi
  • /ebook 150dpi
  • /prepress 300dpi
  • /printer 300dpi
  • /default no change
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS={SETTING} -dNOPAUSE
-dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile={OUTPUT}.pdf {INPUT}.pdf

img2pdf

Included to provide increased functionality for import scripts. This will enable lossless conversion of images to pdf's, enabling import into paperless. The following example will strip alpha channel data from png's and convert to a lossless pdf for import.

convert test.png -background white -alpha remove -alpha off out.png
img2pdf out.png -o import.pdf

Merge PDF's

Now directly supported in Paperless.

Actions ➔ Merge

Select documents in merge order.

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dBATCH -sOutputFile={OUTPUT}.pdf {INPUT}1.pdf
{INPUT}2.pdf

Split PDF's

Now directly supported in Paperless.

Actions ➔ Split

Select document first.

For documents that failed consumption, manually split before re-adding to the consumption directory.

# Repeat for each chunk of the PDF document.
gs -dBATCH -dPDFINFO {INPUT}.pdf
gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dBATCH -sOutputFile={OUTPUT}.pdf -dFirstPage=1
-dLastPage=3 {INPUT}.pdf

Reverse Proxy

Reverse proxy configuration has drastically changed resulting in multiple reported issues (674, 817, 712). Be sure to set the following configuration variables:

PAPERLESS_USE_X_FORWARD_HOST=true
PAPERLESS_USE_X_FORWARD_PORT=true
PAPERLESS_URL=https://paperless.example.com
PAPERLESS_CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS=https://paperless.example.com
PAPERLESS_ALLOWED_HOSTS=paperless.example.com
PAPERLESS_CORS_ALLOWED_HOSTS=https://paperless.example.com

Receiving a 403 after logging in explicitly

Forbidden (403) CSRF verification failed. Request aborted.

See the Proxy Rule Changes and be sure to add referrer-policy to allow requests through:

add_header Referrer-Policy 'strict-origin-when-cross-origin';

Restart both NGINX and Paperless and try again.

Reference1

  1. https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/administration ↩