Warning

There is now a port of Paperless-ngx for FreeBSD: https://www.freshports.org/deskutils/py-paperless-ngx/

It supercedes this port, both in quality and functionality.

Although it is only available for FreeBSD 14 and 15, it is possible to get it installed and running on FreeBSD 13: https://tinsuke.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/how-to-install-py-paperless-ngx-on-freebsd-13/

Work on this port will stop.

A Paperless-ngx port for FreeBSD

The port will install paperless-ngx on FreeBSD.

Installation

Pre-built

1. Download a pre-packaged .pkg file from https://github.com/tinsukE/paperless-ngx-freebsd-port/releases.
2. Install it with pkg install file

From source

Install directly from this repo's code:

git clone https://github.com/tinsukE/paperless-ngx-freebsd-port
cd paperless-ngx-freebsd-port
make install

How to run

1. Configure the service to start automatically: sysrc paperless_enable=YES
2. Create a user: /usr/local/bin/paperless_manage createsuperuser
3. Optional: configure Paperless-ngx by editing /opt/paperless/paperless.conf
4. Start it: service paperless start

How to update to a new paperless-ngx release

These are instructions for myself, but feel free to create a PR if I have been slacking in updating the port.

1. Run make clean to start off with a clean state
2. Update the value of DISTVERSION in Makefile
3. Run make makesum to update distinfo
4. Run make extract to have the new release extracted to WRKDIR (defaults to work)
5. Update the versions of the numpy, scikit-learn and scipy ports in Makefile according to the new values in requirements.txt (currently paperless-ngx uses versions higher than the ones available as FreeBSD ports, so skip this)
6. Update all files/patch-* files. As per the Porter's Handbook instructions:
   1. For each file file to patch:
      1. Copy the file to be patched: cp file file.orig
      2. Edit file replaying the updated changes on the existing files/patch-file
   2. Run make makepatch to generate updated patch files in the files directory
7. Run make stage
8. Update pkg-plist:
   1. Run make makeplist > newplist
   2. In newplist:
      1. Replace all occurrences of %%USER%% with paperless
      2. Delete the first line (/you/have/to/check/what/makeplist/gives/you)
      3. Delete the lines for sample files (*.sample)
      4. Delete the lines for rc scripts (etc/rc.d/*)
      5. Copy the block of lines that start with a @ at the begginning of pkg-plist to the beginning of newplist
   3. Replace pkg-plist with newplist

To-do

• Install files to /opt/paperless
• Use gunicorn instead of the development HTTP server
• Update to v2
• Make web host and port configurable
• Make consumption, data and media paths configurable
• Make NLTK optional?
• Install jbig2enc encoder
• Use inotify instead of polling the consumption folder: inotify_simple PR and make it work
• Set PAPERLESS_SECRET_KEY to a random sequence of characters. It's used for authentication. Failure to do so allows third parties to forge authentication credentials.
• Set PAPERLESS_OCR_LANGUAGE to the language most of your documents are written in
• Set PAPERLESS_TIME_ZONE to your local time zone.