🗄 filer

A web application to make filing scanned PDF documents simpler.

Use Case

We use a scanning app on our smartphones to scan documents to an inbox on a local file server at home. The filer web application shows an inbox document and provides a set of pre-configured rules to categorize it. Selecting a rule moves the document to its final destination in the document archive directory structure and the next inbox document is displayed.

Features

Preview PDF document from an inbox directory
Move inbox document, based on a set of configurable rules, to another directory
Rename inbox document before moving it to the document archive
Delete inbox document without moving
Mobile-friendly browser user interface in your own language (currently german and english. Your translations are welcome! 🥰)

The Story aka "Why!?"

We went paperless some years ago at home and made scanning receipts and other documents a habit. To make the scanning as effortless as possible, we decided to upload the resulting PDF files automatically to a shared inbox directory on our file server. Unfortunately, filing and categorizing the scans afterwards turned out to be too cumbersome to do regularly: Sitting down and moving files from one folder to another was just nothing we enjoy that much 😇

filer makes this task less tedious for us: Open the web application, have a glance on the PDF preview, select one of the preset actions, repeat until the inbox is empty.

Usage

Create a rules.yml file with your categorization rules of choice (see "Rules" Section below).
Prepare two directories:
- Inbox: filer will process PDFs from here. Usually this is the directory where you put your scanned documents.
- Document archive: The root of your document archive.

Start a filer Docker container:

docker run -it --rm \
  -v /your/inbox:/inbox \
  -v /your/archive:/data \
  -v /your/rules.yml:/rules.yml \
  -p 8000:8000 \
  ghcr.io/swissmanu/filer/filer:latest

Access filer via https://localhost:8000

Configuration

Rules

rules:
  # Moves a document from the inbox to "FILER_DATA_PATH/Receipts":
  - name: "Receipts"
  	description: "Receipts and bills"
    actions:
      - type: "move"
        target: "Receipts"
  # Moves a document from the inbox to "FILER_DATA_PATH/Insurances/Health":
  - name: "Health Insurance"
  	description: "All documents related to our health insurance"
    actions:
      - type: "move"
        target: "Insurances/Health"

Environment Variables

Environment Variable	Default	Description
`FILER_ADDR`	`:8000`	A network interface and port where filer will provide its API and UI via HTTP.
`FILER_INBOX_PATH`	`./inbox`	Path to the inbox directory.
`FILER_DATA_PATH`	`./data`	Path to the data directory. Rule target paths are always evaluated relative to the data path.
`FILER_RULES_PATH`	`./rules.yml`	Path to a YAML file containing rule definitions.
`FILER_UI_PATH`	`./ui`	Path to filers web user interface. This variable is useful during development; you can ignore it in productive environments.
`UMASK_SET`	`-022`	Set the `umask` value for files created by the filer application.

Development

Start development

make install      # Install dependencies
make start-ui     # Start rollup in watch mode
make start-server # Start http server

swissmanu / filer