One Command to Rule Your Documents

I have a confession: I've been hoarding paper. Not physically - I went paperless years ago - but digitally. Scanned receipts in random folders, tax documents named scan_final_FINAL_v3.pdf, and a growing sense of dread every time I needed to actually find something.

So I built Paperless Overconfigured - a production-ready Paperless-NGX stack that goes way beyond the basics. AI-powered document classification, automated encrypted backups, barcode tracking, secure remote access, and a hardened Docker setup. The whole thing.

And then I made it installable with a single command.

The One-Liner

bash <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tural-ali/paperless-overconfigured/main/install.sh)

That's it. One command, and you get an interactive wizard that walks you through everything. No YAML wrangling, no Docker Compose debugging at 2 AM, no "wait, which environment variable was that again?"

What the Installer Actually Does

The script detects your OS - Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, macOS, and NixOS are all supported - and launches an 8-step interactive wizard:

1. Install directory - pick where everything lives
2. Admin credentials - set up your Paperless-NGX admin account
3. Remote access method - choose between Tailscale or Cloudflare Tunnel for secure access from anywhere (or skip it entirely)
4. AI provider - pick Gemini, OpenAI, or Ollama (local) for automatic document classification via paperless-gpt
5. OCR languages - select which languages your documents use
6. Timezone - because timestamps matter
7. Automated backups - configure backups to Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or encrypted GitHub repos
8. Review & confirm - see everything before it runs

Each step has sensible defaults, so you can just hit Enter through most of it if you want a quick setup.

What's in the Stack

Once installed, you get a full production-grade document management system:

• Paperless-NGX - the core document management system with web UI, full-text search, tagging, and workflows
• paperless-gpt - AI-powered automatic classification that reads your documents and suggests tags, correspondents, and document types
• PostgreSQL - proper database backend (not SQLite)
• Redis - task queue and caching
• Gotenberg - document conversion (Office docs to PDF, etc.)
• Apache Tika - content extraction from basically any file format you throw at it
• Cloudflare Tunnel (optional) - secure remote access without exposing ports

The entire Docker stack is memory-limited and hardened - each container has resource constraints so nothing goes rogue and eats all your RAM. I learned that lesson the hard way.

Why I Built This

I've set up Paperless-NGX on multiple machines - for myself, for family, on different operating systems - and every time it was the same dance. Copy the docker-compose file, tweak the environment variables, forget to set up backups until something breaks, realize I never configured OCR for the right languages...

Paperless Overconfigured is the setup I wish I'd had from the start. It's opinionated (hence "overconfigured") but in a way that means you get a complete, production-ready system out of the box instead of a minimal install that needs hours of tweaking.

Open Source, Tested, MIT Licensed

The whole thing is open source under the MIT license. CI tests pass across the supported platforms, and contributions are welcome.

Check out the repo: github.com/tural-ali/paperless-overconfigured

If you've been meaning to get your document chaos under control, give it a try. One command, eight questions, and you're done.

If you run into issues or have feature requests, open an issue on GitHub. This is a hobby project, but I use it daily, so I'm motivated to keep it working.