linuxrebe1op17 hours ago
I had an issue. A documents folder with over 12k objects in it. A hodgepodge of folders and sub-folders. That over time had created a mess that no amount of file movement was ever going to make it usable. I wanted: 1) To keep my data local 2) be able to filter out PII and other data 3) Be able to find and delete duplicates 4) Get short synopsis of what a document is 5) Semantic and keyword search 6) All of this kept local to me requiring no internet access and no tokens spent to train someone elses AI.
The result I call DocuBrowser and in it's current form is FOSS (GPL-3) licensed for your personal use. The UI is in your browser. The AI models used are held local and are tiny, Available for Linux(RPM,Deb, and tgz) Windows and Mac. Let me know what you think and thanks for taking the time to try it out.
seb120414 hours ago
Sounds similar to https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/
Key difference I see is that you point it to a folder instead of uploading to a system.
vsviridov12 hours ago
I think paperless devs are working on AI integration, and there are 3rd party solutions. I'm holding out for an official one, so far.
It's pretty cool, I've set up a share where the scanner scans, and it automatically picks it up from there and ingests it into the system.
fnordian30 minutes ago
It’s either restricted to personal use, or it’s GPL-3. How can you have both?
gatnoodle6 hours ago
This looks really cool. Can you tell me the minimum specs required to run this? It would nice if you could add it to the readme as well.
bobim16 hours ago
Could it be extended so it also extracts pictures from pptx and xlsx and run vision to get a description to be added to the text content before indexing?
linuxrebe1op14 hours ago
Let me look into this
esperent5 hours ago
I've been working on something related - extracting tons of data from various formats to allow searching them - and the solution I chose for xlxs and xls files was headless LibreOffice to convert them to CSV. There's also exceljs but I found it didn't work for many old xls files.
I didn't find screenshotting of spreadsheets worked well, vision wasn't very accurate on them. I do use it for PDFs though. For docx it's probably fine either way but I went with LibreOffice -> markdown.
clif_mcIrvin12 hours ago
How about jpegs or other scanner images files? We have hundreds of scanned documents that were never pdf wrapped.
password432113 hours ago
Personal use? I need this at work, dragging useful info from tarpits like Teams and GitLab.
Also need to search git repos including all branches and history (TIL/xkcd#153'd GitLab's web search can basically only do one branch at a time).
rukshn8 hours ago
But how’d you access teams when it’s work teams and don’t have api access ?
linuxrebe1op10 hours ago
I creating DocuRepo as well. though not as fleshed out.
karmakaze10 hours ago
I learned a solution is to turn the documents into vectors in say PostgreSQL (with pgvector) and do a cosine similarity search with a search vector. Doing a search for embed models on HuggingFace shows nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v1.5 and Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B. I might have used a larger one like Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-4B.
There's some info for AnythingLLM[0] which supports RAG. AnythingLLM has LanceDB out of the box but also supports others including pgvector.
asciimoo16 hours ago
We need projects like this. Automatically classifying the files is smart.
I'm working on a similar application called Hister (https://github.com/asciimoo/hister). I should borrow some of your ideas. =]
hankbond10 hours ago
I have not set up Hister yet but it's on my list to try out. How would I do something like host it on my Unraid box but have it index/persist my local MacBook browsing history?
appstorelottery4 hours ago
Anyone getting a bunch of permission errors when running (e.g. Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Users/tron/Applications/DocuBrowse/venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/psutil/_psosx.py", line 347, in wrapper return fun(self, args, *kwargs) File "/Users/tron/Applications/DocuBrowse/venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/psutil/_psosx.py", line 508, in net_connections rawlist = cext.proc_net_connections(self.pid, families, types) PermissionError: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted (originated from proc_pidinfo(PROC_PIDLISTFDS) 1/2)
appstorelottery4 hours ago
Living in bizarro world of AI. Install open source project, fails, feed into OpenCode w/DeepSeekFlash 4 -> feed error into it get fixed.
The kill_port function only catches ImportError from the psutil block, so when psutil is installed but raises AccessDenied (common on macOS), it crashes instead of falling back to lsof.
In platform_paths.py - add two lines after line 250:
except psutil.Error: pass
Fixed. Now when psutil raises AccessDenied (as happens on macOS without elevated privileges), it falls through to the lsof/fuser fallback instead of crashing. Try docubrowser start again.
appstorelottery3 hours ago
Disappointed that it wasn't returning a list of paragraphs from eBooks that semantically match; search only appears to list the publications - not the actual match within the document.
kamranjon5 hours ago
Wanted to share Antfly which I think serves a similar niche:
https://github.com/antflydb/antfly
They’ve put a lot of effort into optimizing the local llm pipelines and I have a lot of faith in the devs working on it.
nickweb6 hours ago
Honestly. This with Paperless-NGX might be game changing if both pointed to the same folder.
Ozzie_osman3 hours ago
This is really cool. Can it play nice with gdrive or Dropbox? For better or worse, that's just where my data lives now but I'd love this layer.
mune2gu-chan8 hours ago
Not a fan of pushing every personal document to someone else's cloud. Nice to see a tool that keeps everything on disk instead.
NKosmatos16 hours ago
Looks good, definitely going to try it. Extra thanks for creating something fully local, we need more projects like this one!
linuxrebe1op10 hours ago
thankyou
Avery2910 hours ago
The hardest part of these projects is usually not making documents searchable
aucisson_masque16 hours ago
I'm a huge fan of recall, going to test this out. This looks very interesting.
rahimnathwani8 hours ago
Did you mean Recoll (https://www.recoll.org/)?
toomuchtodo16 hours ago
How do you feel about supporting an S3 compatible target as a feature request?
linuxrebe1op10 hours ago
I'm actually thinking of this for a commercial product feature. However, if you use a tool like Rclone on Windows, Linux or Mac. Mount the s3 bucket and you can then run DocuBrowse as if the s3 bucket were local.
subhobroto9 hours ago
I love your project on many fronts. One, you're using Claude. Two, you used Python - but most importantly, you personally care about it.
I will be using this, and I will be making contributions to it as well.
> I'm actually thinking of this for a commercial product feature
Would you consider writing down which features you would like to make commercial product features and how you would like to price them?
[deleted]7 hours agocollapsed
jphorism14 hours ago
Nice, what are you hoping to accomplish with this project?
linuxrebe1op10 hours ago
- Filling a need I personally have. - Learning how to leverage AI for real world use not just to fill up a data center. - Personal knowledge -developing skills
Pretty much in that order
passwordoops12 hours ago
Care to elaborate?
NamlchakKhandro12 hours ago
A resume
drizzler14 hours ago
I just installed this and, after a few hiccups, got it up and running on my Ubuntu system. Works great, looks great. Thank you for this. Half of my documents are OpenDocument format. Is there any chance you'll be supporting ODF in the future?
linuxrebe1op10 hours ago
Yes, not supporting it is an oversight I will correct.