Ordnung!

A document archive for families and small households – folders you already understand, a search that actually finds things.
Self-hosted · open source (AGPL-3.0) · German, English, French, Italian

Deutsch: README.de.md

Why another document archive?

Most document managers are built around tags and filters. That is powerful – and most people never warm to it. Ordnung! turns it around: the folders are the truth. A document lives where you would look for it (Insurance › Nordlicht › Buildings), as a normal PDF on your disk. Ordnung! reads those folders, makes everything searchable and helps you file new post. Switch the app off and your archive is still perfectly readable via Finder, Explorer or SMB – in twenty years too.

Features

• One tree for the whole family. Each person, the household or a house is an area (a top folder). Everyone sees all areas they may read in a single merged tree; rights are read or read + write per area. Areas do not need to belong to anyone – “House Linden Lane” simply has members.
• Full-text search over title, folder and the text of every page, scans included (Tesseract OCR, German and English). Partial words and small typos still match. #tag filters by tag.
• Inbox with suggestions. Scanner folders are watched; new documents wait in the inbox with a suggested folder, title and date. Suggestions come from rules, from the inbox subfolder, or – if you like – from an AI (Claude, Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible server). Nothing is filed without you.
• Rules for humans. Ordnung! recognises senders by the web or mail address in the letter and asks after filing: “Post from Nordlicht Insurance → Insurance › Nordlicht › Buildings from now on?” – with a traffic light that shows how reliable a rule is on your existing archive.
• Mail inbox. Send or forward PDFs to an address of their own, from the phone too. Ordnung! collects them via IMAP, takes PDF attachments only and only from addresses stored with a user, and presets that person's area.
• Upload from the phone. Take photos with the iPhone camera; several pages become one PDF, HEIC is converted automatically. Works as a home-screen web app.
• PDF editor. Fill in forms, add text, ticks, the date and your stored signature. The result is saved as a new document next to the original, which stays untouched.
• Collections. Gather documents from many folders – Tax return 2026 – without moving them. Download a collection as ZIP or as one merged PDF for your tax advisor.
• Tags, trash, drag and drop. Drag documents onto folders to move them, onto collections to link them. Deleted documents stay in the trash for 30 days (configurable).
• Old files. Papers you no longer need but want to keep: one by one, a whole folder or “everything older than X years” go to <area>/Altablage/. The tree keeps them apart, the search finds them only on request, taking them back restores the old folder.
• REST API for everything the UI does: key under Settings → API, guide in docs/api.en.md, every endpoint to try out at /api/docs.
• Moving from Paperless-ngx is supported with an import planner.

Quick start with Docker

services:
  ordnung:
    image: ghcr.io/orohde/ordnung:latest
    container_name: ordnung
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8440:8000"
    volumes:
      - ./archiv:/archiv        # your document folders – Ordnung! files new documents here
      - ./data:/data            # index, settings, accounts
      - ./eingang:/eingang      # optional: scanner / inbox folders

docker compose up -d

Open http://localhost:8440. On the first visit you create the first administrator there (only from the home network), then set up your archive and inbox folders under Settings → Storage. Everything else – users, text recognition, home network, API key, mail inbox, AI – is set in the app, not in the compose file.

The image is built for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 (Raspberry Pi, Apple silicon).

On Unraid, install it from the Apps tab (template repository orohde/unraid-templates).

Settings

Settings live in the app. The compose file only needs folders, port and, if necessary, the user:

These older variables now only give the defaults for a fresh installation; once something is saved in the app, the app wins:

Signing in from outside

Behind a reverse proxy that overwrites X-Forwarded-For (Caddy does by default), Ordnung! knows whether a sign-in comes from the home network or from outside. Under Settings → Security you can allow access from outside only for accounts with a second factor (authenticator app, with ten one-time recovery codes), and have every sign-in from outside, locked accounts and changes to the second factor reported via ntfy. Sessions are kept on the server: signing out, changing the password or Sign out all others under My account really ends them. After five failed attempts an account is paused for a minute, doubling up to 15 minutes, counted separately for inside and outside.

Mail inbox

Create a mailbox of its own (say inbox@example.org) and enter IMAP server, user and password under Settings → Mail inbox. With each user, list the addresses they send from under E-mail addresses (several separated by commas). Ordnung! collects every minute and puts the PDF attachments into the inbox, forwarded mails included. The area is the sender's, adjustable under Mails belong to. Mails from unknown addresses, without a PDF or with a forged sender (according to the mail server's Authentication-Results) are moved to Abgelehnt in the mailbox and deleted after 7 days (configurable, 0 = at once). Taken mails end up in Abgelegt.

Try the demo

tools/demo/make_demo.py builds an installation with an invented family, invented companies and letters (the screenshots above come from it):

python tools/demo/make_demo.py /tmp/ordnung-demo --lang en
ORDNUNG_ARCHIVE=/tmp/ordnung-demo/archiv ORDNUNG_DATA=/tmp/ordnung-demo/data \
ORDNUNG_ADMIN_USER=demo ORDNUNG_ADMIN_PASSWORD=demo1234 python -m ordnung
python tools/demo/make_demo.py /tmp/ordnung-demo --lang en --setup http://localhost:8000

How it stores things

archiv/
  max/Health/Doctors/2026-02-14_Private invoice_8f2c1a.pdf
  familie/Banking/Sample Savings Bank/Statements/2026-03-31_Account statement March 2026_3ebe93.pdf
  haus/Insurance/Nordlicht/Buildings/2026-01-12_Buildings insurance policy_a41b07.pdf

File names follow date_title_id; the id is the start of the file's SHA-256, so duplicates are recognised. SQLite is only an index and can be rebuilt from the folders at any time. Tags, collections, rules and accounts live as small JSON files in the data folder.

Development

python -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e '.[dev]'
.venv/bin/python -m pytest -q
ORDNUNG_ARCHIVE=./archiv ORDNUNG_DATA=./data ORDNUNG_ADMIN_PASSWORD=test1234 .venv/bin/python -m ordnung

Python · FastAPI · SQLite FTS5 · pypdfium2 · Tesseract · PDF.js · pdf-lib · SAP Fundamental Styles. No build step for the web UI.

License

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. Free software, no paid edition. More at worldgate.de.