Docspell – Simple document organizer
Docspell is a Document Management System (DMS), a system that asists in organizing your piles of documents, resulting from scanners, e-mails and other sources with miminal effort.
Categories:
Docspell is a self-hosted document management system that automatically organizes piles of documents from scanners, emails, and other sources using OCR, machine learning suggestions, and full-text search.
🚀 Overview
Docspell is a personal document organizer, often called a Document Management System (DMS), designed to handle digital documents with minimal user effort. It ingests files from various sources, processes them with OCR and ML for metadata extraction and tagging, and provides powerful search capabilities.
It solves the problem of tediously organizing scattered documents like bills, receipts, contracts, and emails by automating matching to contacts, suggesting tags and dates, and making everything searchable.
Built for individuals, families (through shared 'collectives'), and small teams or companies needing a private, self-hosted solution.
The creator developed it to offer a simple, powerful DMS that's easy to set up and use daily, avoiding complex enterprise tools or cloud dependencies.
✨ Key Features
- Automatic document matching and tagging using an address book and ML-powered suggestions for correspondents, dates, and tags
- OCR text extraction with Tesseract for scanned documents and images, converting files to searchable PDFs while preserving originals
- Full-text search on extracted text, metadata, names, notes, and properties
- Multi-user 'collectives' for shared access with individual logins
- Email integration including SMTP sending with auto-completion, scheduled IMAP mailbox imports, and notifications via email, Matrix, or Gotify
- Mobile-friendly web app, Android share app, CLI tool, and REST API
- Optional: Upcoming custom addons and scripts
🛠 Tech Stack
- Frontend: Elm, Tailwind CSS
- Backend: Scala (Typelevel stack: Cats Effect/FS2, Http4s, Doobie, Circe, Pureconfig)
- Database: PostgreSQL (recommended), MariaDB, H2
- Search: PostgreSQL full-text or Apache Solr
- Auth: Custom (collective/user login)
- Hosting: Docker Compose, Nix/NixOS, Helm Charts, Debian packages
👥 Who Is This For?
This project is useful for:
- Individuals who want to organize personal paperwork like bills and scans
- Families looking for shared household document management
- Small teams building private, self-hosted DMS without SaaS costs
📸 Screenshots / Demo
- Live demo: Self-hosted quickstart at http://localhost:7880/app
- GitHub: https://github.com/eikek/docspell
Demo videos and screenshots available on the project site.
🔥 Project Status
- 🟢 Actively building
Last updated: 2025-03-15
❓ FAQ
Is this project free?
Yes / Open Source (AGPLv3 license) (Free to use, self-host, and modify.)
Is the source code available?
Yes — https://github.com/eikek/docspell
Can I contribute?
Yes — report bugs or suggest features via GitHub issues, submit pull requests following Contributing.md, or chat on Gitter for feedback.
📬 Contact & Links
- Website: https://docspell.org
- GitHub: https://github.com/eikek/docspell
- Twitter/X: N/A
- Email: info@docspell.org
Built with ❤️ and kept warm on WarmIndex.
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