Docker compose recipe for The Paperless Project + OCRmyPDF that uses inotify to detect new files and process them

I wanted to archive processed documents and re-try OCR on DpiError using img2pdf, so I rolled out my own script instead.

This image relies on inotify events from your host system propagating into the container. This works if your host system is Linux, but does not if your host system is Windows (for example, see http://blog.subjectify.us/miscellaneous/2017/04/24/docker-for-windows-watch-bindings.html)

Note that since recently (late 2019) OCRmyPDF docker image includes watcher.py (based on Python watchdog module), so you might consider using it instead, even though it depends on filesystem polling.

This is a file-based workflow, organized in a bunch of folders inside "scans"

• PDFs to be OCRed are put into "in"

• inotify-based script picks them up and passes them to OCRmyPDF

• OCRmyPDF does its job, temporary creating files in "ocr"

• Once file is processed, the original is moved from "in" to "archive", and OCRed document is put into "ocr-ed"

• Paperless picks it up from "ocr-ed" and moves it into "documents"

If you have PDFs that do not need OCR, inject them in the middle of this pipeline by putting them in "ocr-ed"

Move "config" and "scans" folders somewhere on your filesystem.

Change paths in .env to point to the locations of "config" and "scans"

If you need extra languages, configure them in docker-compose.yml and modify Dockerfile to install them into ocrmypdf container. Dockerfile currently is written to include English, Russian and Ukrainian languages.

Run "docker-compose up -d" and navigate to http://localhost:8000 to configure Paperless.