Docspell

Docspell is a personal document organizer. You'll need a scanner to convert your papers into files. Docspell can then assist in organizing the resulting mess 😉.

You can associate tags, set correspondends, what a document is concerned with, a name, a date and some more. If your documents are associated with this meta data, you should be able to quickly find them later using the search feature. But adding this manually to each document is a tedious task. What if most of it could be done automatically?

It is provided as a REST server and a web application and is intended to be self-hosted.

How it works

Documents have two main properties: a correspondent (sender or receiver that is not you) and something the document is about. Usually it is about a person or some thing – maybe your car, or contracts concerning some familiy member, etc.

1. You maintain a kind of address book. It should list all possible correspondents and the concerning people/things. This grows incrementally with each new unknown document.
2. When docspell analyzes a document, it tries to find matches within your address book. It can detect the correspondent and a concerning person or thing. It will then associate this data to your documents.
3. You can inspect what docspell has done and correct it. If docspell has found multiple suggestions, they will be shown for you to select one. If it is not correctly associated, very often the correct one is just one click away.

The set of meta data, that docspell uses to draw suggestions from, must be maintained manually. But usually, this data doesn't grow as fast as the documents. After a while there is a quite complete address book and only once in a while it has to be revisited.

Impressions

Checkout the short demo videos (<1min), present on the project page. Here are some screenshots:

Try it

Docspell consists of several components. The probably quickest way to get started is to use the docker setup as described in the get started page. This is only three commands away:

git clone https://github.com/eikek/docspell
cd docspell/docker
DOCSPELL_HEADER_VALUE="my-secret-123" docker-compose up

Then go to http://localhost:7880, sign up and login. Use the same name for collective and user for now. More on that can be found here.

Other ways are documented here:

• Install the provided deb file at your debian based system.
• Download provided zip file and run the script in bin/, as described here.
• Using the nix package manager as described here. A NixOS module is available, too.

Documentation

The project page has lots of information on how to use and setup docspell.

Contributions

Feedback and other contributions are very welcome! There is now a gitter room for quick questions. You can open an issue for questions, problems and other feedback; or make a mail to info [at] docspell.org.

License

Docspell is free software, distributed under the GPLv3 or later.