Docspell – Simple document organizer | WarmIndex

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