File Uploads🔗
This page describes, how files can get into docspell. Technically, there is just one way: via http multipart/form-data requests.
Authenticated Upload🔗
From within the web application there is the "Upload Files" page. There you can select multiple files to upload. You can also specify whether these files should become one item or if every file is a separate item.
When you click "Submit" the files are uploaded and stored in the database. Then the job executor(s) are notified which immediately start processing them.
Go to the top-right menu and click "Processing Queue" to see the current state.
This obviously requires an authenticated user. While this is handy for ad-hoc uploads, it is very inconvenient for automating it by custom scripts. For this the next variant exists.
Anonymous Upload🔗
It is also possible to upload files without authentication. This should make tools that interact with docspell much easier to write. The Android Client App uses these urls to upload files.
Go to "Collective Settings" and then to the "Source" tab. A Source identifies an endpoint where files can be uploaded anonymously. Creating a new source creates a long unique id which is part of an url that can be used to upload files. You can choose any time to deactivate or delete the source at which point uploading is not possible anymore. The idea is to give this URL away safely. You can delete it any time and no passwords or secrets are visible, even your username is not visible.
Example screenshot:
This example shows a source with name "test". Besides a description and a name that is only used for displaying purposes, a priority and a folder can be specified.
The priority is used for the processing jobs that are submitted when files are uploaded via this endpoint.
The folder is used to place all items, that result from uploads to this endpoint, into this folder.
The source endpoint defines two urls:
/app/upload/<id>/api/v1/open/upload/item/<id>
The first points to a web page where everyone could upload files into your account. You could give this url to people for sending files directly into your docspell.
The second url is the API url, which accepts the requests to upload files. This second url can be used with the Android Client App to upload files.
Another example is to use curl for uploading files from the command line::
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There is a cli to upload files from the command line more conveniently.
When files are uploaded to an source endpoint, the items resulting from this uploads are marked with the name of the source. So you know which source an item originated. There is also a counter incremented for each reqest.
If files are uploaded using the web applications Upload files page,
the source is implicitly set to webapp. If you also want to let
docspell count the files uploaded through the web interface, just
create a source (can be inactive) with that name (webapp).
Other options🔗
More details about the actual http request and other upload options can be found here.