Document Management System (DMS)

A local Django-based Document Management System with OCR, department-level access control, document organization, and search.

Architecture

• dms_project/: Django project configuration
• accounts/: custom user model, company/department/unit structure, authentication
• documents/: document model, OCR processing, search and management views
• templates/: Django templates for dashboard, upload, list, detail, edit
• media/: local file storage for uploaded documents
• Dockerfile / docker-compose.yml: containers for local development

Features

• Login/logout with role-based access (Admin, Manager, Staff)
• Company / Department / Unit hierarchy
• Document upload for PDF/image files with OCR
• OCR text extraction and metadata suggestions
• Folder-style storage under media/storage/{department}/{year}/{document_type}/
• Document search by title, tags, OCR content, department, and date
• Archive browsing by department, year, and document type
• Basic API endpoints for document listing and detail
• Secure file handling with department-level document access

Setup

1. Create and activate a virtual environment:

   python -m venv .venv
   .venv\Scripts\activate

2. Install requirements:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Install system dependencies on Linux:

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install -y tesseract-ocr poppler-utils

4. Configure PostgreSQL and environment variables in dms_project/settings.py or via environment. PostgreSQL is the production database and should be used for deployment:

   • POSTGRES_DB
   • POSTGRES_USER
   • POSTGRES_PASSWORD
   • POSTGRES_HOST
   • POSTGRES_PORT

   For local development only, you may optionally set DJANGO_USE_SQLITE=True.

5. Run migrations and create a superuser:

   python manage.py migrate
   python manage.py createsuperuser

6. Start the development server:

   python manage.py runserver

7. Open http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your browser.

Docker

docker compose up --build

The web app will be available at http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Production deployment

Create a local .env file from .env.example and set production values.

Start the production stack with:

docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml up --build

Then browse to http://localhost.

This setup uses:

• PostgreSQL as the production database
• Gunicorn as the application server
• Nginx as a reverse proxy
• media/ for uploaded files

Notes

• Use Django admin to create companies, departments, units, and roles.
• Uploaded documents are stored in media/storage/.
• OCR is powered by Tesseract and uses pdf2image for PDF rendering.
• The app is designed to be deployable behind Nginx later.