Searchable Scanned Documents in iCloud Drive

Originally posted at mandarons.com

Problem statement

With an ongoing shift to paperless transactions, it has been easier than ever to reduce paper (and save the environment) in our lives. However, with a lot of real-world paper is going electronic, searching for something in the scanned documents has been a huge challenge for me.

I started to look for answers.

Background

Being in Apple ecosystem, I wanted something to allow me to index specific folder in iCloud drive (I prefer all of my scanned documents go in a specific folder), with a web interface and of course, ability to self-host.

I stumbled upon the Paperless-ng project. It has the features I am looking for - web GUI and dockerized for self-hosting. Cool! But how about dockerized iCloud drive client?

Well, I couldn't find any reliable ones. So I decided to make one - Dockerized iCloud Drive. By the way, pyiCloud is awesome! 😎

Solution

prerequisites

[ ] Docker (on Windows/Linux/MacOS or any other OS you have) [Required]
[ ] Docker-Compose [Strongly recommended]

Setup

[ ] Create following directories in your home (or any other location) for our applications:
- [ ] /home/mandarons/paperless-ng
- [ ] /home/mandarons/icloud-drive
- [ ] /home/mandarons/postgres
- [ ] /home/mandarons/redis
[ ] Create a directory for syncing iCloud Drive (one way):

Let's call it as drive located at /home/mandarons/icloud-drive/drive. This will be shared between icloud-drive and paperless-ng docker containers.
[ ] Create config.yml file at /home/mandarons/icloud-drive/config.yml with following configuration:

credentials:
  # iCloud drive username
  username: <icloud-username> # replace with your icloud username/email
  # iCloud drive password - leave it empty. We will configure keyring in the next step
  password:
settings:
  sync_interval: 1800 # every 30 minutes
  destination: './drive' # local to icloud-drive container
  remove_obsolete: false # to retain deleted items on iCloud server
  verbose: false # not needed until something goes wrong.
filters:
  # File filters to be included in syncing iCloud drive content
  folders:
    - Documents #relative location in your iCloud drive to contents to scan
  file_extensions:
    # File extensions to be included - below are common scanned document formats
    - pdf
    - png
    - jpg
    - jpeg

[ ] Create a docker-compose.yml file /home/mandarons/docker-compose.yml.
[ ] Copy following code into docker-compose.yml file

version: "3.4"

services:
  postgres:
    container_name: postgres
    image: postgres:11.3-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<unique-complex-string> #Change it
    ports:
      - 5432:5432
    volumes:
      - ${PWD}/postgres/data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    healthcheck:
      test: pg_isready -U postgres
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 30s

  redis:
    container_name: redis
    image: redis:alpine3.12
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 6379:6379
    command: redis-server --appendonly yes
    volumes:
      - ${PWD}/redis/data:/data
    healthcheck:
      test: redis-cli server ping
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 30s

  paperless-ng:
    image: jonaswinkler/paperless-ng:0.9.13
    container_name: paperless-ng
    restart: unless-stopped
    depends_on:
      - postgres
      - redis
      - icloud-drive
    ports:
      - 8083:8000 # or any other port you want to use
    volumes:
      - ${PWD}/paperless-ng/data/data:/usr/src/paperless/data
      - ${PWD}/paperless-ng/data/media:/usr/src/paperless/media
      - ${PWD}/paperless-ng/data/export:/usr/src/paperless/export
      - ${PWD}/icloud-drive/drive:/usr/src/paperless/consume
    environment:
      USERMAP_UID: 1000
      USERMAP_GID: 1000
      PAPERLESS_OCR_LANGUAGES: eng
      PAPERLESS_SECRET_KEY: random-secret-key # Feel free to change it to anything else
      PAPERLESS_TIME_ZONE: America/Los_Angeles # Or your time zone
      PAPERLESS_REDIS: redis://redis:6379
      PAPERLESS_DBHOST: postgres
      PAPERLESS_DBNAME: paperless-ng-db 
      PAPERLESS_DBUSER: paperless-ng-db-user 
      PAPERLESS_DBPASS: paperless-ng-db-user-password
      PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_RECURSIVE: 'true' # For recursive scanning of `drive` directory
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://<host-ip-address>:8083"] # <host-ip-address> is your system's IP address on which docker is installed
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 5

  icloud-drive:
    image: mandarons/icloud-drive:1.0.0
    container_name: icloud-drive
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - ${PWD}/icloud-drive/config.yaml:/app/config.yaml # We will create the config file in next step
      - ${PWD}/icloud-drive/drive:/app/drive

[ ] On a command line, change current directory to /home/mandarons and Run docker-compose up -d to create containers.
[ ] Create POSTGRES database for paperless-ng
- [ ] Log into postgres container: docker exec -it postgres /bin/sh
- [ ] Run following commands:

# su - postgres
  $ psql
  postgres=# create database paperless-ng;
  postgres=# create user paperless-ng-user with encrypted password 'paperless-ng-user-password';
  postgres=# grant all privileges on database paperless-ng to paperless-ng-user;

We are now set with the database. No special configuration is required for redis.

[ ] Configure icloud-drive for auto-login using keyring utility by running command: docker exec -it icloud-drive /bin/sh -c "icloud --username=<icloud-username>" and follow the prompts to authenticate.
[ ] Relaunch the containers with updated configuration from /home/mandarons/ using docker-compose down && docker-compose up -d
[ ] Navigate to http://<host-ip-address>:8083 to lauch paperless-ng.

And that's it! Depending on number and size of your scanned documents, it will take some time to show all of them in paperless-ng web app.

May the Laziness be with you! 😄