What is this

Paperless-ng is a great document management system but lacks an important feature for me, which is automatic life cycle management for documents. This means that I can mark a document for auto-removal (or not, see below) after a certain amount of time passes since it is added to the system.

This is a quick&dirty solution which does not need to modify the data model but instead uses the API and a cronjob to periodically check for documents that need to be removed.

How it works

paperless_lcm will check for tags on your documents that start with LCM_prefix and check if the document creation date + the amount of time specified in the tag is greated than the current date. If so, depending on the AUTO_DELETE flag it will either add a "to be removed" tag or DELETE your document if AUTO_DELETE=yes.

WARNING: Be REALLY careful. This will DELETE your documents. The script is provided as is with no responsibility over your deployment. Test it first.

LCM tags should be in the <LCM_PREFIX> like:

• LCM_15d if you want the document to be removed in 15 days.
• LCM_6m if you want the document to be removed in 6 months.
• LCM_1y if you want the document to be removed in 1 year.

NOTE: Only days, months and years are supported.

How to install it

Create a config.ini file with the following contents:

[paperless]
HOST=<paperless URL>
USER=<user>
PASSWORD=<password>
AUTO_DELETE=<yes|no>
REMOVAL_TAG=<tag to apply>
LCM_PREFIX=<your tag prefix>

NOTE: REMOVAL_TAG has to exist. Won't be created.

And then either deploy directly the script or use the provided docker image. Then, setup a crontab rule to run it at the desired frequency.

The script will look for config.ini either at the same folder or inside /config/ if running as a container. For example, run it as:

docker run --rm -v <Folder containing config.ini>:/config/ iverona/paperless_lcm