A web application to make filing scanned PDF documents simpler.

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.

• 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! 🥰)

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.

1. Create a rules.yml file with your categorization rules of choice (see "Rules" Section below).

2. 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.

3. 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

4. Access filer via https://localhost:8000

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"

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