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Comment by frde | Hacker News Reader

Looking through the setup, this seems like an insane way to package an application for users to install: https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/setup

The documentation itself is so full of implementation details that, as someone who is interested in the concept of this, I'm scared off even trying to setup and use this

The project would be much more approachable if there was a simple native installer. My parents could also benefit from this but there's no way they would ever even understand how to install this, much less troubleshoot docker things.

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It doesn’t look like the project goals include being installable by your parents

It looks to sit in the self hosted space that has an admin manage all the sysadmin tasks. They’ve provided docker which is a pretty good step.

There are desktop apps designed at the single user/less experienced user, which might be more suitable

You might want Recoll[1]. Similar if less powerful capabilities, cross-platform, open source, has Windows and macOS installers.

Still an overly complex FOSS user interface for a tech-unsavvy target with lots of digging around to configure it (OCR setup, for instance[2]), but at least you don't need to know what Docker is to install it.

1: https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/

2: https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/usermanual/webhelp/doc...

It's a bit rich calling it insane just because it's not immediately approachable for you. Not every project is aiming for mass-adoption and if you want to lower the barriers, that's on you to make happen.

Like a sibling commenter is already doing, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37802337

Consider pitching in time/money there (if welcome) instead of complaining when not everything is served to you on a silver platter.

A sqlite backend would be another thing that could reduce the complexity for a minimal OoB setup, I guess.

Truth the told, I wouldn't find it unfair to call the architecture/setup "insane". This is not one. If you've done any meaningful self-hosting in the past decade, it's as straightforward as it can be.

Sqlite is already supported and the default.

Self-hosting services usually entails more technical knowledge than just installing an app and I don't think a document management system would necessarily work well as a native application. For starters, there's the backup issue and you wouldn't want non-technical people to store important documents that only live on a local drive. Remote web access is also a very useful feature for when travelling and that wouldn't be easy to setup for a local install.

I've been using it for over a year and am very happy with it, though I intend on moving it from my home Pi docker swarm onto a free Oracle cloud instance to improve the performance and uptime (I've got my Pis auto updating and rebooting, so services get shunted around fairly often).

The project would be much more approachable if there was a simple native installer

Actually the very first example on https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/setup lists an interactive installer which asks the user some question and eventually arrives at a working docker-compose setup.

    $ bash -c "$(curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/main/install-paperless-ngx.sh)"

If you ask me, this is already pretty user friendly. Although I agree that if your needs are more involved, there is some reading you'll have to do.

I am currently in the process of migrating from mayan-edms to paperless-ngx and it feels pretty approachable to me if you know your way around docker (compose).

It is designed to be a server application, so it'd be very difficult to offer a desktop-like app experience, that's easier to install.

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