Stirling PDF

Stirling PDF is an amazing collection of on-line tools to edit, cut, rotate and edit PDF files. Being able to self-host it is amazing and a must-have.

Stirling-PDF can be installed on bare-metal, but the list of dependencies is so thick and complex that this is one of those situations where a container is highly recomended.

So first of all, as usual, create the dedicated user:

useradd -d /data/daemons/stirlingpdf -m stirlingpdf

and, as user stirlingpdf, create the /data/daemons/stirlingpdf/docker-compose.yml file:

docker-compose.yml

version: '3.3'
services:
  stirling-pdf:
    image: frooodle/s-pdf:latest
    ports:
      - '8089:8080'
    volumes:
      - /data/daemons/stirlingpdf/trainingData:/usr/share/tessdata #Required for extra OCR languages
      - /data/daemons/stirlingpdf/extraConfigs:/configs
#      - /location/of/customFiles:/customFiles/
#      - /location/of/logs:/logs/
    environment:
      - DOCKER_ENABLE_SECURITY=false
      - INSTALL_BOOK_AND_ADVANCED_HTML_OPS=false
      - LANGS=en_GB
      - SYSTEM_ROOTURIPATH=/stirlingpdf
    network:
      - stirlingpdf-net

networks:
  stirlingpdf-net: {}

Adapt the paths and the port to your needs (8089).

Now pull it:

su - stirlingpdf
podman compose pull

The following NGINX configuration file is the base for Stirling-PDF:

sitrlingpdf.conf

location /stirlingpdf/ {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8089;
        access_log off;
        client_max_body_size 200M;
        proxy_read_timeout 3600;
}

Adapt the port to match the one in the docker compose. I also suggest to set a proper client_max_body_size to allow upload/download of big enough files, and also the proxy_read_timeout value.

See The Reverse Proxy concept

To start it, and set it up on boot, as usual follow my indications Using Containers on Gentoo, so link the user-containers init script:

ln -s /etc/init.d/user-containers /etc/init.d/user-containers.stirlingpdf

and create the following config file:

/etc/conf.d/user-containers.stirlingpdf

USER=stirlingpdf
DESCRIPTION="The PDF manager server"

Add the service to the default runlevel and start it now:

rc-update add user-containers.stirlingpdf default
rc-service user-containers.stirlingpdf start