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Paperless-ngx

The Paperless-ngx integrationIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] allows you to connect your Paperless-ngx instance to Home Assistant and monitor its status and activity.

Prerequisites

Important

This integration is only fully supported with Paperless-ngx version 2.15 or later. Earlier versions are not supported.

To ensure full functionality of this integration, you must have read permissions for all document-related resources, including documents, tags, document types, and correspondents.

To enable monitoring of diagnostic sensors, you must have administrator permissions. Without administrator rights, specific API endpoints cannot be accessed, and the sensor states will not be available.

Create an access token
  1. Log in to your Paperless-ngx instance.
  2. In the upper-right corner, select your profile icon.
  3. Select My Profile.
  4. Under API Auth Token, select the right Refresh button next to the textbox to generate a new token. Confirm with yes.
  5. Copy the token and use it during the integration setup in Home Assistant.

Configuration

To add the Paperless-ngx service to your Home Assistant instance, use this My button:

Manual configuration steps

If the above My button doesn’t work, you can also perform the following steps manually:

  • Browse to your Home Assistant instance.

  • Go to Settings > Devices & Services.

  • In the bottom right corner, select the Add Integration button.

  • From the list, select Paperless-ngx.

  • Follow the instructions on screen to complete the setup.

URL

URL to connect to the Paperless-ngx instance.

API key

API key to connect to the Paperless-ngx API.

Verify SSL certificate

Verify the SSL certificate of the Paperless-ngx instance. Disable this option if you’re using a self-signed certificate.

Use cases

The integration can be used to build automations to help and notify you of new documents in your paperless instance. The update sensor could notify you if a new paperless-ngx version is available.

Supported functionality

The Paperless-ngx integration provides statistic and diagnostic entities to Home Assistant. Below is an overview of these entities and their function.

Sensors

This integration provides sensorsSensors return information about a thing, for instance the level of water in a tank. [Learn more] for the following information from Paperless-ngx:

Sensor Description
Correspondents Indicates the total number of defined correspondents.
Document types Indicates the total number of defined document types.
Documents in inbox Indicates the number of documents currently in the inbox.
Tags Indicates the total number of defined tags
Total characters Indicates the total number of characters extracted from all documents.
Total documents Indicates the total number of documents stored.
Total storage Indicates the total disk space used by Paperless-ngx.
Available storage Indicates the remaining available disk space for Paperless-ngx.
Status database Indicates whether the database is reachable and functioning correctly.
Status index Indicates whether the document indexing service is operational.
Status classifier Indicates whether the document classifier service is running properly.
Status Celery Indicates whether the Celery task queue is active and processing tasks.
Status Redis Indicates whether the Redis service used for task queuing is available.
Status sanity Indicates the sanity of the Paperless-ngx documents.
Software Indicates whether a new Paperless-ngx update ist available.

Example automations

Send a push notification if a new document is available 
alias: New document push notification
description: Sends a push notification if a new document is available
triggers:
  - entity_id: sensor.paperless_documents_inbox
    to: null
    trigger: state
conditions:
  - condition: template
    value_template: |
      {% if trigger.from_state is not none and trigger.to_state is not none %}
        {{ trigger.to_state.state > trigger.from_state.state }}
      {% else %}
        false
      {% endif %}
actions:
  - action: notify.mobile_app_iphone
    metadata: {}
    data:
      message: A new document is available.

Data updates

This integration retrieves data using a pull-based mechanism.

  • Statistic sensors are pulled every 120 seconds
  • Diagnostic sensors are pulled every 300 seconds
  • Update checks to detect new Paperless-ngx versions are performed every 24 hours

Known limitations

There are a few known limitations for using the integration:

  • This integration is only fully supported with Paperless-ngx version 2.15 or later. Earlier versions are not supported.
  • To enable monitoring of diagnostic sensors, you must have administrator permissions. Without administrator rights, specific API endpoints cannot be accessed, and the sensor states will not be available.

Removing the integration

This integration follows standard integration removal. No extra steps are required.

To remove an integration instance from Home Assistant

  1. Go to Settings > Devices & services and select the integration card.
  2. From the list of devices, select the integration instance you want to remove.
  3. Next to the entry, select the three dots menu. Then, select Delete.

Troubleshooting

Message: 'Invalid hostname or IP address'

If you get the message Invalid hostname or IP address, try the following steps:

  1. Make sure you enter a complete URL, such as https://paperless.example.com or https://192.168.178.11:8011.

  2. SSL is enabled by default. If you’re using an unencrypted connection, you must explicitly use http:// instead of https:// in the URL.

  3. If you’re using a self-signed certificate, disable the Verify SSL certificate option.

Message: 'The token does not have permission to access the API'

If you get the message The token does not have permission to access the API, try the following steps:

  1. Verify whether the token is still valid and correctly assigned to the user.

  2. Test the token using the Swagger interface available at https://paperless.example.com/api/schema/view/

    • Click on “Authorize” in the Swagger UI to enter your token at tokenAuth (apiKey).
    • Then, try accessing the relevant endpoints like /api/statistics/ to ensure they respond as expected.

  3. If everything works correctly in Swagger but the integration still fails, check whether a reverse proxy (e.g., NGINX) is returning an HTTP 403 error. If so, the integration may also report this as a permission issue.

Removing the integration

This integration follows standard integration removal, no extra steps are required.

To remove an integration instance from Home Assistant

  1. Go to Settings > Devices & services and select the integration card.
  2. From the list of devices, select the integration instance you want to remove.
  3. Next to the entry, select the three dots menu. Then, select Delete.

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