The Paperless Project

I use Python because it's a beautiful (both visually and in terms of function) and multi-purpose language. In Paperless, Python is the primary connecting tissue holding all of the parts together: it's the basis of the consumption engine (communicating with Tesseract OCR via pyOCR) and the user-interface (based on Django).

Django is an amazing web framework that comes with everything you need, and makes it easy to turn off the stuff you don't.

In the case of Paperless, I needed a simple way to build a site that had a pre-built "CRUD" interface, and that's the Django admin. Django also supports things like management commands and signals, which we use throughout the project along with its built-in testing framework.

SQLite is a tricky beast. It's great if you're working single-threaded, but a Terrible Idea if you've got more than one concurrent connection. You use it because it's easy to setup, light, and portable (it's just a file).

In Paperless, we've built a self-hosted web application, so it makes sense to standardise on something small & light, and as we don't have to worry about multiple connections (it's just you using the app), it's a perfect fit.

For users wanting to scale Paperless up to a multi-user environment though, we do provide the hooks to switch to PostgreSQL .

Alpine Linux is what you use when you care about disk space and not so much about features. As Paperless is using Docker to run its various components: (read: single-purpose virtual machines), Alpine makes perfect sense as each component can be built custom and stripped down to just what we need.