paperless-ngx/docs/faq.md

# Frequently Asked Questions

## _What's the general plan for Paperless-ngx?_

**A:** While Paperless-ngx is already considered largely
"feature-complete" it is a community-driven project and development
will be guided in this way. New features can be submitted via GitHub
discussions and "up-voted" by the community but this is not a
guarantee the feature will be implemented. This project will always be
open to collaboration in the form of PRs, ideas etc.

## _I'm using docker. Where are my documents?_

**A:** Your documents are stored inside the docker volume
`paperless_media`. Docker manages this volume automatically for you. It
is a persistent storage and will persist as long as you don't
explicitly delete it. The actual location depends on your host operating
system. On Linux, chances are high that this location is

```
/var/lib/docker/volumes/paperless_media/_data
```

!!! warning

    Do not mess with this folder. Don't change permissions and don't move
    files around manually. This folder is meant to be entirely managed by
    docker and paperless.

## Let's say I want to switch tools in a year. Can I easily move to other systems?

**A:** Your documents are stored as plain files inside the media folder.
You can always drag those files out of that folder to use them
elsewhere. Here are a couple notes about that.

- Paperless-ngx never modifies your original documents. It keeps
  checksums of all documents and uses a scheduled sanity checker to
  check that they remain the same.
- By default, paperless uses the internal ID of each document as its
  filename. This might not be very convenient for export. However, you
  can adjust the way files are stored in paperless by
  [configuring the filename format](/advanced_usage#file-name-handling).
- [The exporter](/administration#exporter) is
  another easy way to get your files out of paperless with reasonable
  file names.

## _What file types does paperless-ngx support?_

**A:** Currently, the following files are supported:

- PDF documents, PNG images, JPEG images, TIFF images, GIF images and
  WebP images are processed with OCR and converted into PDF documents.
- Plain text documents are supported as well and are added verbatim to
  paperless.
- With the optional Tika integration enabled (see [Tika configuration](/configuration#tika),
  Paperless also supports various Office documents (.docx, .doc, odt,
  .ppt, .pptx, .odp, .xls, .xlsx, .ods).

Paperless-ngx determines the type of a file by inspecting its content.
The file extensions do not matter.

## _Will paperless-ngx run on Raspberry Pi?_

**A:** The short answer is yes. I've tested it on a Raspberry Pi 3 B.
The long answer is that certain parts of Paperless will run very slow,
such as the OCR. On Raspberry Pi, try to OCR documents before feeding
them into paperless so that paperless can reuse the text. The web
interface is a lot snappier, since it runs in your browser and paperless
has to do much less work to serve the data.

!!! note

    You can adjust some of the settings so that paperless uses less
    processing power. See [setup](/setup#less-powerful-devices) for details.

## _How do I install paperless-ngx on Raspberry Pi?_

**A:** Docker images are available for armv7 and arm64 hardware, so just
follow the docker-compose instructions. Apart from more required disk
space compared to a bare metal installation, docker comes with close to
zero overhead, even on Raspberry Pi.

If you decide to got with the bare metal route, be aware that some of
the python requirements do not have precompiled packages for ARM /
ARM64. Installation of these will require additional development
libraries and compilation will take a long time.

## _How do I run this on Unraid?_

**A:** Paperless-ngx is available as [community
app](https://unraid.net/community/apps?q=paperless-ngx) in Unraid. [Uli
Fahrer](https://github.com/Tooa) created a container template for that.

## _How do I run this on my toaster?_

**A:** I honestly don't know! As for all other devices that might be
able to run paperless, you're a bit on your own. If you can't run the
docker image, the documentation has instructions for bare metal
installs. I'm running paperless on an i3 processor from 2015 or so.
This is also what I use to test new releases with. Apart from that, I
also have a Raspberry Pi, which I occasionally build the image on and
see if it works.

## _How do I proxy this with NGINX?_

**A:** See [here](/setup#nginx).

## _How do I get WebSocket support with Apache mod_wsgi_?

**A:** `mod_wsgi` by itself does not support ASGI. Paperless will
continue to work with WSGI, but certain features such as status
notifications about document consumption won't be available.

If you want to continue using `mod_wsgi`, you will have to run an
ASGI-enabled web server as well that processes WebSocket connections,
and configure Apache to redirect WebSocket connections to this server.
Multiple options for ASGI servers exist:

- `gunicorn` with `uvicorn` as the worker implementation (the default
  of paperless)
- `daphne` as a standalone server, which is the reference
  implementation for ASGI.
- `uvicorn` as a standalone server