scanservjs

Copyright 2016-2026 Sam Strachan

What people are saying

I've decided to switch to using only this, I find using this in a browser is just perfect and way better than bloated software from printer manufacturers

It enabled me to still use my old hp3900 scanner without worrying about drivers and vendor specific UIs. Furthermore, scans just being accessible via an awesome web interface makes it even more brilliant!

This is a great project! The touchscreen and buttons on my Brother scanner are broken, meaning the device is useless by itself because one cannot trigger scans, but with this project I can trigger it remotely just fine.

Absolutely love untethering my scanner from my laptop. Also means that I know it will work "forever", regardless of OS updates, since its all just a docker container.

About

scanservjs is a web UI frontend for your scanner. It allows you to share one or more scanners (using SANE) on a network without the need for drivers or complicated installation.

Features

• Cropping
• Source selection (Flatbed / ADF)
• Resolution
• Output formats (TIF, JPG, PNG, PDF and TXT with Tesseract OCR) with varying compression settings
• Filters: Autolevels, Threshold, Blur
• Configurable overrides for all defaults as well as filters and formats
• Multipage scanning (with collation for double sided scans)
• International translations: Arabic, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese (PT & BR), Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian; Help requested
• Light and dark mode
• Responsive design
• Docker images for amd64 and arm64
• OpenAPI documentation

It supports any SANE compatible devices.

Requirements

• SANE Scanner
• Linux host (or VM with necessary pass-through e.g. USB)
• Software sane-utils, ImageMagick, Tesseract and nodejs

Install

• Debian:

  curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sbs20/scanservjs/master/bootstrap.sh | sudo bash -s -- -v latest
  

• Arch:

  yay -S scanservjs
  

• Docker:

  docker run \
    --detach \
    --publish 8080:8080 \
    --volume /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus \
    --restart unless-stopped \
    --name scanservjs-container \
    --privileged sbs20/scanservjs:latest
  

Documentation

Installation and setup

• Standard install
• Docker install
• SANE setup
• Troubleshooting

Configuration

• Configuration
• Integration
• Recipes
• Using a proxy

Developing

• Development
• Localisation
• Testing
• References
• QNAP

Running scanservjs

In most cases the use of the app should be fairly self-explanatory. When the app first loads, it attempts to detect your scanner - this step is the most precarious and may either require custom drivers or some additional steps if you're running a network scanner or docker. See the documentation above for more.

Once the scanner is detected then you have a number of pages.

Scan

This page gives access to the controls for your scanner. The app will generally find the settings available automatically, although some scanners mis-report their abilities. (If this is the case, then you can override what's detected, see Configuration and device override for more). If geometry is available (selecting scan size and position) then you will have cropping available to you.

There is also the ability to perform batch scanning. If you have a document feeder, then just use the Auto option. If not then use Manual and the app will prompt you to change pages between scans.

Any scan operation will always result in a single file. Some image formats, such as PDF and TIF support multiple pages, while others, such as PNG and JPG do not. If the scan pipeline results in more than one file, then the app will zip the files into a single output. You can choose the image format under Format.

You can create and customise your own pipelines.

Files

Any scanned files will be saved in a flat directory which has a simple web view available on this page. The intended usage of the app is to allow the user to save their scans locally - i.e. to download the files. The app will never delete these files, but if you run under docker then unless volume mapping is specified then the files may be lost when you run a new version.

Furthermore, users in real life will want to store their scans with their own names, directory structures and cloud services or NAS devices. The permutations and possibilities are endless and are beyond the scope of the app.

scanservjs can integrate files either through pipeline automation or file actions. See integration documentation for more.

Settings

The settings page allows you to change the appearance and locale / language.

About

Copyright information and system info.

OpenAPI documentation

There is built in OpenAPI documentation with an API explorer. Access it direct using /api-docs or navigate from the About page.

Why?

This is yet another scanimage-web-front-end. Why? It originally started as an adaptation of phpsane - just to make everything a bit newer, give it a refresh and make it work on minimal installations without imagemagick - that version is still available but is no longer maintained. Since then, I just wanted to write it in node and enhance it a bit, and it's been a labour of love ever since.

Acknowledgements

• This project owes its genesis to phpsane
• Everyone who has filed issues, tested, fixed issues, added translations and helped over the years. Thank you!

More about SANE

• http://www.sane-project.org/