Deploy and Host DocSpell on Railway

Docspell aims to be a simple yet effective document organizer that makes stowing documents away very quick and finding them later reliable (and also fast). It is a bit opinionated and more targeted for home use and small/medium organizations.

The main focus is to extract and attach metadata from each document, so it is really easy to find a document later. Automatic document processing is available. It is also possible to add custom properties and arbitrary tags. Docspell analyzes the text to find metadata automatically. It can learn from existing data and can apply NLP techniques to support this. This metadata must be maintained manually in the application.

Everything is available via a REST or HTTP api and can be easily used within your own scripts and tools, for example using curl. There are also features for "advanced use" and many configuration options.

About Hosting DocSpell

Docspell consists of multiple components that run in separate processes:

• REST server
• JOEX, short for job executor
• Fulltext Search Index (optional, Apache SOLR or PostgreSQL; not included in this installation) The REST server provides the api and the web application. The web application is a SPA written in Elm and is a client to the REST api. All features are available via a http/rest api.

The joex is the component that does the “heavy work”, executing long-running tasks, like processing files or importing your mails periodically. While the joex component also exposes a small REST api for controlling it, the main user interface is all inside the rest server api.

The rest server and the job executor can be started multiple times in order to scale out. It must be ensured, that all connect to the same database. And it is also recommended (though not strictly required), that all components can reach each other.

The fulltext search index is another separate component, where currently SOLR and PostgreSQL is supported. Fulltext search is optional, this component is not required if docspell is run without fulltext search support. (This deployment does not include fulltext search by default.)

Common Use Cases

• Automatic document processing and archiving
• Document management

Dependencies for DocSpell Hosting

Of course, all of these are included in the docker image by default.

• Java, JDK 17 and up
• Ghostscript
• Unpaper (optional)
• Tesseract
• Unoconv
• wkhtmltopdf is used to convert HTML into PDF files.
• OCRmyPDF (optional)

Deployment Dependencies

N/A

Why Deploy DocSpell on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying DocSpell on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.