Document Manager

Docspell Is An Open-source Document Management System (DMS) For Individuals and Enterprises

Hazem Abbas

Jun 3, 2023 — 3 min read

Docspell is a personal document organizer. Or sometimes called a "Document Management System" (DMS). You'll need a scanner to convert your papers into files. Docspell can then assist in organizing the resulting mess 😉. It can unify your files from scanners, emails and other sources. It is targeted for home use, i.e. families, households and also for smaller groups/companies.

You can associate tags, set correspondents and lots of other predefined and custom metadata. If your documents are associated with such metadata, you can quickly find them later using the search feature. But adding this manually is a tedious task.

Docspell can help by suggesting correspondents, guessing tags or finding dates using machine learning. It can learn metadata from existing documents and find things using NLP. This makes adding metadata to your documents a lot easier. For machine learning, it relies on the free (GPL) Stanford Core NLP library.

Docspell also runs OCR (if needed) on your documents, can provide full text search and has great e-mail integration. Everything is accessible via a REST/HTTP api. A mobile friendly SPA web application is the default user interface. An Android app exists for conveniently uploading files from your phone/tablet and a cli. The feature overview lists some more points.

Features

Easy to use interface
Tags and categories
OCR
Edit metadata
Multiple document select
full text search
Organize docs in folders
Create custom fields
Upload multiple files by drag-and-drop
Organize tags in categories
Filter documents by sources, tags, categories, due date, metadata, and size
Inbox view
Manage and organize contacts, manuals, docs, and more

Tech

Backend

The servers is written in Scala in a pure functional style, based on libraries from the typelevel stack: Cats, FS2, Doobie, Http4s, Circe and Pureconfig.

There are more libraries and technologies used, of course. Docspell is only a orchestration of great tools and libs. One important is the Stanford-NLP, that provides the ML features. Furthermore, file processing relies on external tools like tesseract, unoconv and ocrmypdf. All dependencies can be looked up in project/Dependencies.scala.