Table of Contents
ScanServJS
At first i tried to make saned work, the great network extension to Sane scan tool for Linux. Unfortunately it turns out that the scanner i own (a MFD HP Laser printer/scanner) cannot be shared with saned over the network because the HP provided driver does not allow it. Frankly it seems more an oversight / bug than anything else, but still that's an issue, because i do not want to install HP drivers on all my computers just for scanning.
Luckly, ScanServJS is very nice, simple and powerful WEB GUI to the sane backend which works wonders and can be self-hosted on your home server.
Prerequisites
ScanServJs require, of course, sane-backends package to be installed and your scanners to be configured to work locally on the server. I will not cover those steps here, i assume your scanner is already properly configured and can scan with the saned user on the server.
You must install nodejs and the deb2targz packages, because ScanServJS is deployed as a DEB package and requires NodeJS to run.
So, if you don't already have them:
emerge -vp app-arch/deb2targz nodejs
Also, you might want to install tesseract to enable OCR functionalities.
Installation
You will need to alter a little bit the content of the DEB package, because it's better to install it on /opt/scanservjs rather than having it mess with your /usr and /var system folders, so as root:
mkdir /opt/scanservjs chown saned:scanner /opt/scanservjs
And then now, as user saned:
sudo -u saned bash cd /opt/scanservjs wget https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs/releases/ << get here latest deb file for your server >> deb2targz scanservjs_X.Y.Z-1_all.deb tar xvf scanservjs_X.Y.Z-1_all.tar.xz cd usr/lib/scanservjs
Now, since the DEB package assumes it's installed on /usr you need to recreate two symlinks:
rm config ln -s /opt/scanservjs/etc/scanservjs config rm data ln -s /opt/scanservjs/var/lib/scanservjs data
Now move the default config file from /opt/scanservjs/etc/scanservjs/config.default.js to /opt/scanservjs/etc/scanservjs/config.local.js and edit to resemble the following (adapt where needed):
- config.local.js
const options = { paths: ['/opt/scanservjs/usr/lib/scanservjs'] }; config.host = '127.0.0.1'; config.port = 7781; config.scanimage = '/usr/sbin/scanimage'; config.convert = '/usr/bin/convert'; ... [ omissis ] ...
And that's it!
NGINX configuration
I choose to install ScanServJS as a sub-path of my home.mydomain.com, so this is the relative NGINX config file:
- scanner.conf
location = /scanner { return 301 https://$host/scanner/; } # Interfaccia Web stmapante HP location /scanner/ { proxy_pass http://10.70.43.1:7781/; }
For more details, see The Reverse Proxy concept
And restart your NGINX service.
Start and Autostart
Since i use OpenRC, just drop the following /etc/init.d/scanservjs:
- scanservjs
#!/sbin/openrc-run # Copyright 1999-2021 Gentoo Authors # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 description="SCan from web interface" pidfile="/run/scanservjs.pid" command_background=true command="node /opt/scanservjs/usr/lib/scanservjs/server/server.js " command_args="" command_user="saned:scanner" depend() { need net } start_pre() { cd /opt/scanservjs/usr/lib/scanservjs export NODE_ENV=production }
make it executable and add it to the default runlevel:
chmod +x /etc/init.d/scanservjs rc-update add /etc/init.d/scanservjs default /etc/init.d/scanservjs start
Update
Get new DEB, replace files, restart!