Lighweight DMS for personal use

Question

I need a small, lightweight DMS for personal use, which is available on Linux.

Requirements:

• runs on Linux
• manages PDF
• stores documents in the file system¹ in an easily recognizable structure²
• offers a GUI (WebUI is fine, native Linux GUI as well)
• not too many dependencies (e.g. no KDE libs as I don't use KDE)
• tags, manual descriptions
• find documents by tags, name, date, description

Strongly preferred:

• available via standard repositories (Debian/Ubungu/Mint) or at least easy to install
• OCR capabilities (for full-text search), or at least offering full text search for documents having text (for PDF, e.g. integrated via pdfsandwich; for LibreOffice, extracted from the document)

Nice to have:

• maintains other formats (images, ODF (LibreOffice/OpenOffice) documents)
• integrated document viewer capable to deal with supported formats
• scan folders for (new) documents (so I can drop them in the right place and the DMS indexes them). A special "drop folder" is OK, but even better if I can place the documents where they belong. The folder(s) don't need to be monitored; manually triggering the index process is totally fine.
• custom fields
• grouping of connected documents (think of "book series" having multiple volumes). This could e.g. also be achieved by attaching/merging multiple documents onto/into a single record.

Using a database backend for metadata is fine (it it does, preferably SQLite or MySQL).

Not needed:

• multi-user, approvals etc. (as pointed out above: personal use only)
• Windows compatibility
• "reference systems". I just need to manage my own documents. References between those are fine – but I'm not collecting external references.
• encrypted storage (if that's needed, I can encrypt the file system)

Definitely unwanted:

• cloud-based (unless self-hosted) – so no Evernote, please.

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I know we have quite a few DMS questions, but none of them completely meets my requirements. Most of them are asking for collaborative features, but I only want a light-weight variant for personal use. Coming close (and how they miss):

• Free document management system with file system integration: .NET, MSSQLServer, other MS related, eMail updates
• PDF organizer with virtual hierarchy, fast viewer, highlighting, search: rather looks for a reference system
• Free software document management: automated processing, email, mirrors
• Document manager for paperless office: Windows
• Simple open source document scan/tag/catalog more lightweight than Alfresco: very close; but no FOSS, no OCR

I've also seen paperless which basically fits the above, but seems pretty complex to install. Zotero is already mentioned in the footnotes; but in addition to that it's rather for reference management.

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¹ _{should the software die, I still can find and access the documents}
² _{e.g. Zotero fails this one, using cryptic directory names}

Answer 1

Due to the lack of alternatives, I've settled for a very minimalist approach meanwhile. All ingredients are available from the standard repositories on Ubuntu/Mint, though for more up-to-date versions, at least for one part I instead used the Debian package offered at the project's website:

PDFSandwich is a wrapper around some tools like unpaper (to optimize pages for better OCR results), Tesseract (for OCR'ing the PDFs) and some helpers like Ghostscript and ImageMagick. You feed it a PDF, and it spits out another one which combines the original one with its OCR results:

pdfsandwich -lang eng sample.pdf

will result in sample_ocr.pdf, which is a sandwich of the two.

Now, I organize the documents in an appropriate directory structure. And when I still don't know what PDF has the contents I'm after, I switch to the root directory and use

pdfgrep -r -i foobar

Which spits out a list of each line from all the documents containing "foobar", prefixed by the path/to/document.pdf.

No elegant GUI, but it does its job. Let's see how it meets my original criteria:

• runs on Linux: Yes.
• manages PDF: Indeed.
• stores documents in the file system¹ in an easily recognizable structure²: My job, but: Yes.
• offers a GUI (WebUI is fine, native Linux GUI as well): No, just a CLI
• not too many dependencies (e.g. no KDE libs as I don't use KDE): Definitely.
• tags, manual descriptions: can be realised in the file names. Again, not elegant (e.g. no "global tag rename"), but possible.
• find documents by tags, name, date, description: Not exactly – but sufficient for my use. "By content" is done via pdfgrep, "by name" can be done via | grep <name>, "by date" via other CLI tools (like awkto isolate the file name, then ls -l or stat to get the date and filtering that way – a bit heavy, though :)

The "nice-to-haves" are only vaguely met (sure I can put all other file types into the structure – but then search would be difficult as pdfgrep only deals with PDF, etc. There's no "global index" to search). So I'm still open for alternatives – but for now, this works for me.

Answer 2

you can try using paperless.node I've created:

• runs on Linux, Windows or Mac
• manages PDF, images, emails
• stores documents in the file system their original form in a flat directory
• offers a WebUI
• tags, manual descriptions
• find documents by tags, name, description
• easy to install
• integrated document viewer
• has a drop folder