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Overview

Papermerge DMS is build upon microservice architecture. Microservice architecture means that there are different parts, called microservices, which can be combined in different ways to match your needs.

The idea is to start with very simple setup and then add to it, step by step only what you need.

The simplest possible setup it following:

docker run -p 12000:80 \
    -e PAPERMERGE__SECURITY__SECRET_KEY=abc \
    -e PAPERMERGE__AUTH__PASSWORD=pass123 \
    papermerge/papermerge:3.3

It starts the basic Papermerge DMS microservice, the web app, with one administrative user account, which has username admin and password pass123. Instance is accessible on http://localhost:12000.

Web app overview

What you see in picture above is so called web app microservice. It is the starting point of many setups. Although incomplete, it is pretty good start. Other capabilities can be added as separate microservices. For example in production environment it is better to use production ready database like PostgreSQL (or MariaDB). Depending on your deployment environment you may consider to add S3 storage.

Tip

Always start with basic setup. Extend it gradually based on your needs.

Starting with complex deployment may be overwhelming, especially if you don't understand the basics. Papermerge DMS can have extremely complex deployment k8s cluster setups: with many stateless web app pods, with external authentication server, with S3 storage backend, CDN etc.

Microservices

Following is the list of microservices which can be combined with Papermerge DMS to extend its capabilities:

  • database (PostgreSQL, MariaDB)
  • search engine (currently only Solr is supported)
  • search indexer (syncs database with search engine)
  • OCR worker - performs OCRs on the documents
  • websockets service - use it if you want user to receive real time notifications about background events
  • path template service - moves documents into target path based on the document metadata
  • S3 service - syncs documents with S3 storage

In following sections you will find details of setup of each separate service.

Each service is deployed as docker image. As such, it can be deployed in any dockerized environment. However, this documentation focuses on docker, docker compose, ansible and kubernetes.

Progressive Setup

We call this architecture - progressive setup: you start small, and then you grow and extend Papermerge DMS deployment environment as much as you like.