Overview

Papermerge DMS is a distributed system with many moving parts. “Distributed system” - means that different components (parts) may run on different computers.

Components

Papermerge DMS consists of the following components:

  • RESTful backend server

  • Worker (there may be one or multiple workers)

  • Database

  • Search Engine

The essential parts of Papermerge DMS deployment are RESTful backend server and one or multiple workers.

RESTful Backend Server

or REST API backend server (backend server for short) this is the main piece, the heart of the system so to speak. It is the web application which serves REST API. A typical deployment will have one backend server.

Note

REST API Backend has its own, separate RESTful Backend GitHub repository.

Worker

This part performs “laborious tasks” like for example OCR of the documents.

Note

In order to understand why worker is required at all, a little more background is necessary: the typical web server consists of a series of requests and responses. A well behaved web server for each request it will send a response in less than 100 milliseconds. However, the OCR processing of a single page of the document can easily take several seconds, maybe minutes or even hours(!). This is why OCR processing, relative to typical request/response cycle of the web server, is considered a “laborious task”. And this is why OCR processing must run in a separate component, outside of web server’s request/response cycles.

In a typical Papermerge DMS deployment there can be as many as possible workers. Number of workers depends on the number of incoming documents and how quick you want to process all of them.

For best results each worker should run on a separate computer. In case of docker based deployment - each worker should run in separate docker container.

Note

From source code point of view, worker and REST API web server use same codebase. REST API backend server communicates with workers via Celery/Redis.

Database

In order to operate sucessfully Papermerge DMS needs a database for store data. It can use one of several databases:

  • SQLite

  • PostgreSQL

  • MySQL (MariaDB)

Search Engine

Papermerge DMS supports multiple search engine backends:

  • Xapian

  • Whoosh

  • Elasticsearch

  • Apache Solr

Xapian is used by default.

Installation Options

You can go multiple routes to setup and run Papermerge DMS:

  • Use the docker compose

  • Portainer

  • Kubernetes (instructions will be provided soon)

  • Ansible (instructions will be provided soon)

  • Bare metal installation

Docker Compose

Docker a de facto standard containerization technology. With docker you can start in almost no time pretty complex configuration setups. Docker ships with docker-compose which helps you to easily configure and start all services (like database, redis and elastic search for example) required to operate Papermerge DMS.

For more details read Docker Compose section.

Kubernetes

TODO…

Ansible

TODO…

Bare Metal Installation

This method is suitable if you plan to play around with Papermerge DMS internals. In particular it is for developers. There are two major parts of Papermerge DMS development:

  • backend development

  • frontend development

For the backend part is you need to be familiar with Python/Django/Celery ecosystem. For the frontend part familiarity with JavaScript/Nodejs/EmberJS is necessary.

For more details read Backend Development Setup section and Frontend Development Setup.