Paperless-AIssist

AI document processing for Paperless-ngx that you control, step by step.

Paperless-AIssist lets you decide exactly what runs on each document: tag it with ai-process for the full pipeline, or use step tags like ai-title, ai-ocr, or ai-fields to run only the steps you need.

Run metadata cheaply on local Ollama and reserve a paid vision model for the documents you tag for OCR — text and vision models are configured separately. Works with Ollama (local), OpenAI, Grok (xAI), and OpenRouter.

Features

• Modular tag workflows — run only the steps you need per document (ai-title, ai-ocr, ai-tags, ai-fields, …), or the whole pipeline with ai-process
• Separate text & vision models — keep metadata generation on a local Ollama model and reserve a paid vision model for the documents you tag for OCR; each is configured independently
• Configurable prompts — every step is driven by prompts you edit in the web UI, with bundled samples to start from
• Correspondent, document type & tag classification — LLM picks from your existing Paperless metadata
• Title generation — replaces scanned filenames with meaningful titles
• Custom field extraction — pulls structured data into Paperless custom fields, including optional per-document-type fields
• Vision OCR — uses vision models (Ollama, OpenAI, Grok, OpenRouter) to read documents directly from page images
• OCR post-processing — LLM corrects OCR errors before classification
• Document date detection — updates the Paperless document date when a reliable original date is found
• Document chat — ask questions about any document via the web UI
• Document search & preview — search Paperless documents from the Chat page; preview what AI processing would do without modifying Paperless
• Automation API — trigger, stop, and check processing from cron, Home Assistant, or custom scripts
• Auto-scheduler — polls for new ai-process tagged documents on a configurable interval
• Multilingual UI — web interface available in English and German
• Optional authentication — protect the web UI with your Paperless-ngx credentials; disabled by default

Screenshots

Dashboard

Process Queue

Processing Result

Chat

Configuration

Prompts

Quick Start

1. Pull and run

docker run -d \
  --name paperless-aissist \
  -p 8000:8080 \
  -e PUID=1000 \
  -e PGID=1000 \
  -v paperless-aissist-data:/app/data \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  nyxtronlab/paperless-aissist:latest

Open the web UI at http://localhost:8000

The container runs application processes as a non-root user. Set PUID and PGID to match your host user/group (especially on Unraid).

2. Or use Docker Compose

services:
  paperless-aissist:
    image: nyxtronlab/paperless-aissist:latest
    container_name: paperless-aissist
    ports:
      - "8000:8080"
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
    volumes:
      - paperless-aissist-data:/app/data
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  paperless-aissist-data:

Docker Desktop / Mac / Windows: Use host.docker.internal to reach Ollama on the host. Linux with host networking: Use the host's LAN IP or 172.17.0.1.

3. Configure in the web UI

1. Go to Settings and verify your Paperless and Ollama URLs
2. Set the LLM model (see recommendations below)
3. Create at minimum two tags in Paperless-ngx: ai-process and ai-processed. Optionally create modular step tags (see below) for per-step triggering.
4. Tag any document with ai-process for metadata processing using existing Paperless text. For Vision OCR plus metadata processing, add both ai-ocr and ai-process.

Configuration

All settings are managed through the web UI and stored in SQLite. No environment variables needed — just mount a volume so your config persists across container restarts:

volumes:
  - paperless-aissist-data:/app/data

LLM Providers

The provider is selected per-model in Settings. Ollama runs locally; OpenAI, Grok, and OpenRouter require an API key. The vision model can use a different provider than the main LLM — configure it separately via llm_provider_vision and llm_api_key_vision (e.g. main = Ollama, vision = OpenAI).

OpenAI-compatible endpoints (e.g. LM Studio, vLLM) also work — set the provider to openai and point the URL at your local server.

Generation controls

The main LLM and Vision OCR model each have their own generation settings:

• Temperature controls randomness. Lower values are more deterministic; 0.0–0.3 is recommended for document metadata and OCR.
• Max Output Tokens optionally limits response length. Leave it empty to use the provider default. For Ollama, this is sent as num_predict; for OpenAI-compatible providers it is sent as max_tokens.
• Context Window is Ollama-only and maps to num_ctx. Increase it for large documents, many correspondents/tags, or long prompts. Leave it empty to use the model default. This is different from Max Output Tokens: num_ctx controls how much input context the model can see, while num_predict controls how long the answer may be.

Automation API

External tools can control the same "Process all" workflow that is available in the web UI. This is useful for cron jobs, webhook tools, custom scripts, and Home Assistant RESTful Command automations.

Generate a dedicated token in Settings → Advanced → Automation API. The token is shown once and stored only as a hash.

Use the token as a bearer token:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer paia_..." \
  http://localhost:8000/api/automation/status

Available endpoints:

start is idempotent: if processing is already running, it returns already_running instead of starting a second run. The Automation API token is required even when web UI login is disabled.

The status response includes is_processing, current_document_ids, active_documents with trigger tags, active step, and runtime. last_result contains the last completed Automation API run and is null until the first API-triggered run finishes. Live progress while a run is active is reported via active_documents.

Home Assistant example:

rest_command:
  paperless_aissist_process_all:
    url: "http://paperless-aissist.local:8000/api/automation/process/start"
    method: post
    headers:
      Authorization: "Bearer paia_your_token_here"
      Content-Type: "application/json"

Recommended Models

Text (LLM)

Vision (OCR)

Vision PDF input mode

For the official OpenAI API, Paperless-AIssist can send PDFs natively. For local OpenAI-compatible runtimes such as LM Studio, vLLM, llama.cpp, oMLX, or Ollama's OpenAI-compatible endpoint, use Page images so each PDF page is rendered locally and sent as an image input.

The default Auto mode uses native PDF for api.openai.com and page images for other OpenAI-compatible API bases.

Pull Ollama models before use:

ollama pull qwen3:8b
ollama pull benhaotang/Nanonets-OCR-s:latest

If Ollama returns 400 Bad Request for large documents or Paperless instances with many correspondents/tags, increase the Context Window setting in the web UI. This sends Ollama num_ctx for text and Vision OCR requests.

Processing Pipeline

Each document tagged with ai-process runs the standard metadata pipeline using the existing text from Paperless. Vision OCR is intentionally tag-controlled because it is slower and can be more expensive. Add ai-ocr when you want Paperless-AIssist to re-read the PDF with a vision model.

1. Title — generates a document title
2. Classification — detects correspondent, document type, and tags
3. Custom field extraction — extracts structured data into Paperless custom fields
4. Tag swap — removes whichever trigger tag(s) were present, adds ai-processed

Modular Tag Workflows

Instead of running the full pipeline with ai-process, you can tag a document with one or more step-specific tags to run only those steps:

Multiple step tags can be combined on a single document. All default tag names can be overridden in Settings.

Common combinations:

OCR correction is guarded for long documents. If the document text is longer than OCR Fix Max Chars (default 10000), the ai-ocr-fix step is skipped and the original document text is kept. This prevents a shortened LLM result from replacing full multi-page OCR output. The limit can be changed in Settings → Advanced or with the optional OCR_FIX_MAX_CHARS environment variable.

Legacy override tags force_ocr and force-ocr-fix are still supported for compatibility. For new workflows, prefer ai-ocr and ai-ocr-fix.

Note on ai-fields + type-specific prompts: When ai-fields runs without ai-document-type, the processor reads the document's current document type from Paperless and uses it to match any active type_specific prompts. You do not need to add ai-document-type just to get type-specific field extraction to work.

ai-date updates the Paperless document date (created_date concept). It does not change when the file was added to Paperless or imported. Low-confidence or ambiguous model results are logged but not written.

Documents tagged with any modular tag are picked up by the scheduler and the process queue alongside ai-process documents.

Prompts

All processing steps are driven by configurable prompts managed in the Prompts page of the web UI.

Prompt Types

Classification Modes

Individual mode (recommended) — correspondent, document_type, and tag prompts run as separate steps. Use this for best accuracy.

Combined mode (legacy fallback) — a single classify prompt handles all three in one call. Only runs if none of the individual prompts are active.

Custom Field Extraction

Both extract and type_specific can be active at the same time — their results are merged, with type_specific taking precedence on conflicts. This lets you define global fields via extract and add document-type-specific fields via type_specific.

The Document Type Filter on a type_specific prompt limits it to run only when the document is classified as that type. For example: document_type_filter = Rechnung runs the prompt only for invoices.

type_specific requires a known document type to decide whether to run. When the document_type prompt (or classify) is active, it uses the newly detected type. When running ai-fields alone, the processor falls back to the document's existing document type in Paperless — so type-specific extraction works without also adding ai-document-type.

Load Samples

Use the Load Samples button in the Prompts UI to add any missing built-in sample prompts. Existing prompts are not blindly overwritten during upgrades: unchanged sample prompts can be updated automatically, while edited, legacy, and custom prompts are preserved. The Prompt Manager shows each prompt's sample status, and a single prompt can be replaced manually with its bundled sample from the edit dialog.

Authentication

By default the web UI is open — no login required. You can restrict access to users with a valid Paperless-ngx account.

Enable auth

Set auth_enabled to true in Settings → Advanced (or via the AUTH_ENABLED=true environment variable).

Once enabled, the UI redirects unauthenticated users to a login page. Sign in with the same username/password you use to log into Paperless-ngx.

How it works

• Login proxies credentials to Paperless-ngx (POST /api/token/) and returns a session token
• The token is stored in localStorage and sent as a Bearer header on every API request
• The backend verifies tokens against Paperless on first use, then caches them for 5 minutes
• Logout invalidates the cached token on the backend and clears localStorage
• If Paperless becomes temporarily unreachable, a previously verified token continues to work until the cache expires

API endpoints

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Paperless-AIssist exposes an MCP server so you can control document processing directly from Claude Desktop or any other MCP-compatible client.

Enable the MCP server

Enable it in Settings → Advanced → MCP Server — it takes effect immediately, no restart needed. The server is off by default. You can also set the MCP_ENABLED=true environment variable as a fallback.

Once enabled, the MCP endpoint is available at /mcp/ (note the trailing slash) on the same port as the web UI. It uses the streamable HTTP transport, so a persistent connection is not required.

Authentication

All MCP requests must carry a valid Automation API token in the Authorization header. Generate a paia_ token in Settings → Advanced → Automation API — the same token used for the REST Automation API.

Available tools

Claude Desktop configuration

Add the following to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "paperless-aissist": {
      "url": "http://paperless-aissist.local:8000/mcp/",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer paia_your_token_here" }
    }
  }
}

Replace paperless-aissist.local:8000 with the hostname and port where Paperless-AIssist is reachable from your desktop.

opencode

Add the server to your opencode.json. Because it authenticates with a bearer token rather than OAuth, set oauth to false:

{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "mcp": {
    "paperless-aissist": {
      "type": "remote",
      "url": "http://paperless-aissist.local:8000/mcp/",
      "oauth": false,
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer paia_your_token_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

opencode supports {env:VAR} interpolation in headers, so you can keep the token out of the file — for example "Authorization": "Bearer {env:PAPERLESS_AISSIST_TOKEN}".

Any MCP client that supports remote streamable-HTTP servers with custom headers can connect the same way — point it at /mcp/ and send the paia_ token as a Bearer Authorization header.

Architecture

• Backend: Python / FastAPI — processing pipeline, Ollama/OpenAI/Grok client, Paperless API client, APScheduler
• Frontend: React 18 / TypeScript / Tailwind CSS
• Database: SQLite (config, prompts, processing logs)
• Runtime: nginx + uvicorn via supervisord in a single container

Comparison with Similar Projects

Paperless-AIssist is not a replacement for Paperless-ngx. It is a small AI middleware that sits beside Paperless-ngx and adds tag-controlled processing, prompt management, Vision OCR, custom field extraction, chat, logs, and an Automation API.

Think of it as the flexible toolbox approach: modular tags, prompt control, separate text and vision models, type-specific extraction, and an Automation API let you build exactly the workflow you want around Paperless-ngx.

This comparison is meant as a practical orientation, not as a ranking. The related projects make different trade-offs and may be the better fit depending on your workflow.

When Paperless-AIssist Fits Best

Choose Paperless-AIssist if you want:

• Tag-controlled processing: run the full pipeline with ai-process, Vision OCR with ai-ocr, or only specific steps such as ai-title, ai-date, or ai-fields.
• A web UI for configuration and prompts instead of editing environment variables for normal day-to-day changes.
• Separate text and Vision OCR model/provider settings, for example local Ollama for metadata and OpenAI/OpenRouter/Grok for selected OCR jobs.
• Type-specific custom field extraction where different document types can use different prompts.
• A lightweight Automation API for cron, Home Assistant, or custom scripts.
• Explicit opt-in Vision OCR so expensive or slow OCR calls only run when tagged.

When Another Tool May Fit Better

• Use native Paperless-ngx AI features if you prefer everything inside the main Paperless-ngx application and do not need external middleware.
• Use paperless-ai-next if you want a more automatic AI assistant with Paperless-AI-style workflows, OCR rescue queues, and operational polish.
• Use Paperless-AI if you already rely on its RAG/chat workflow and it works well in your setup.
• Use paperless-gpt if your main goal is high-quality OCR enhancement, searchable PDF generation, and reviewable OCR/metadata suggestions.

Feedback, issues & PRs are very welcome.

License

MIT