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Integrate with Paperless-ng

Support level: Community

What is Paperless-ng?​

Paperless-ng is an application that indexes scanned documents, makes them searchable, and stores document metadata. It was a fork of the original Paperless project and is no longer maintained.

-- https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng

Paperless-ng supports remote-user authentication through HTTP headers. This guide uses authentik as a forward auth proxy in front of Paperless-ng and configures Paperless-ng to trust the username header set by authentik.

Preparation​

The following placeholders are used in this guide:

  • paperless.company is the FQDN of the Paperless-ng installation.
  • authentik.company is the FQDN of the authentik installation.
info

This documentation lists only the settings that you need to change from their default values. Be aware that any changes other than those explicitly mentioned in this guide could cause issues accessing your application.

Remote-user header authentication

Paperless-ng signs in users based on the trusted remote-user header. Configure your reverse proxy so that requests from clients cannot set or override the X-Authentik-Username header before the request reaches Paperless-ng.

Do not expose Paperless-ng directly to the internet when remote-user authentication is enabled.

authentik configuration​

To support the integration of Paperless-ng with authentik, you need to create an application/provider pair in authentik. This guide assumes that Paperless-ng is already deployed behind a reverse proxy that supports authentik forward auth.

Create an application and provider​

  1. Log in to authentik as an administrator and open the authentik Admin interface.
  2. Navigate to Applications > Applications and click New Application to open the application wizard.
    • Application: provide a descriptive name, an optional group for the type of application, the policy engine mode, and optional UI settings.
    • Choose a Provider type: select Proxy Provider as the provider type.
    • Configure the Provider: provide a name (or accept the auto-provided name), the authorization flow to use for this provider, and the following required configurations.
      • Set Mode to Forward auth (single application).
      • Set External host to https://paperless.company.
    • Configure Bindings (optional): you can create a binding (policy, group, or user) to manage the listing and access to applications on a user's Application Dashboard page.
  3. Click Submit to save the new application and provider.

Configure proxy outpost​

The proxy provider requires an authentik proxy outpost. If you do not already have a proxy outpost, follow the outpost documentation to create and deploy one.

Add the Paperless-ng application to a proxy outpost that will serve it:

  1. Log in to authentik as an administrator and open the authentik Admin interface.
  2. Navigate to Applications > Outposts.
  3. Click the edit icon for the proxy outpost. This can be the built-in authentik Embedded Outpost or another proxy outpost.
  4. Under Available Applications, select the Paperless-ng application and move it to Selected Applications.
  5. Click Update to save your changes.

Paperless-ng configuration​

If you run Paperless-ng with Docker, add the following environment variables to docker-compose.env. For non-Docker installations, add the same values to paperless.conf.

docker-compose.env
PAPERLESS_ENABLE_HTTP_REMOTE_USER=true
PAPERLESS_HTTP_REMOTE_USER_HEADER_NAME=HTTP_X_AUTHENTIK_USERNAME
PAPERLESS_LOGOUT_REDIRECT_URL=https://paperless.company/outpost.goauthentik.io/sign_out

To sign in to an existing Paperless-ng user, the authentik username must match the Paperless-ng username. If the username does not exist, Paperless-ng can create a separate user for the remote-user username.

Configure your reverse proxy to use the authentik outpost as the forward auth endpoint for https://paperless.company. Requests to /outpost.goauthentik.io must be routed to the authentik outpost, and all other requests must be routed to Paperless-ng.

After making these changes, restart Paperless-ng and reload your reverse proxy.

Configuration verification​

To verify the login flow, open Paperless-ng. You should be redirected to authentik before the Paperless-ng web interface is shown.

Resources​