OCRmyPDF Docker image

OCRmyPDF is also available in a Docker image that packages recent versions of all dependencies.

For users who already have Docker installed this may be an easy and convenient option. However, it is less performant than a system installation and may require Docker engine configuration.

OCRmyPDF needs a generous amount of RAM, CPU cores, temporary storage space, whether running in a Docker container or on its own. It may be necessary to ensure the container is provisioned with additional resources.

Installing the Docker image

If you have Docker installed on your system, you can install a Docker image of the latest release.

If you can run this command successfully, your system is ready to download and execute the image:

docker run hello-world

The recommended OCRmyPDF Docker image is currently named ocrmypdf:

docker pull jbarlow83/ocrmypdf

OCRmyPDF will use all available CPU cores. By default, the VirtualBox machine instance on Windows and macOS has only a single CPU core enabled. Use the VirtualBox Manager to determine the name of your Docker engine host, and then follow these optional steps to enable multiple CPUs:

# Optional step for Mac OS X users
docker-machine stop "yourVM"
VBoxManage modifyvm "yourVM" --cpus 2  # or whatever number of core is desired
docker-machine start "yourVM"
eval $(docker-machine env "yourVM")

See the Docker documentation for adjusting memory and CPU on other platforms.

Using the Docker image on the command line

Unlike typical Docker containers, in this section the OCRmyPDF Docker container is ephemeral – it runs for one OCR job and terminates, just like a command line program. We are using Docker to deliver an application (as opposed to the more conventional case, where a Docker container runs as a server).

To start a Docker container (instance of the image):

docker tag jbarlow83/ocrmypdf ocrmypdf
docker run --rm -i ocrmypdf (... all other arguments here...) - -

For convenience, create a shell alias to hide the Docker command. It is easier to send the input file as stdin and read the output from stdout – this avoids the messy permission issues with Docker entirely.

alias docker_ocrmypdf='docker run --rm -i ocrmypdf'
docker_ocrmypdf --version  # runs docker version
docker_ocrmypdf - - <input.pdf >output.pdf

Or in the wonderful fish shell:

alias docker_ocrmypdf 'docker run --rm ocrmypdf'
funcsave docker_ocrmypdf

Alternately, you could mount the local current working directory as a Docker volume:

alias docker_ocrmypdf='docker run --rm  -i --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" --workdir /data -v "$PWD:/data" ocrmypdf'
docker_ocrmypdf /data/input.pdf /data/output.pdf

Adding languages to the Docker image

By default the Docker image includes English, German, Simplified Chinese, French, Portuguese and Spanish, the most popular languages for OCRmyPDF users based on feedback. You may add other languages by creating a new Dockerfile based on the public one.

FROM jbarlow83/ocrmypdf

# Example: add Italian
RUN apt install tesseract-ocr-ita

To install language packs (training data) such as the tessdata_best suite or custom data, you first need to determine the version of Tesseract data files, which may differ from the Tesseract program version. Use this command to determine the data file version:

docker run -i --rm --entrypoint /bin/ls jbarlow83/ocrmypdf /usr/share/tesseract-ocr

As of 2021, the data file version is probably 4.00.

You can then add new data with either a Dockerfile:

FROM jbarlow83/ocrmypdf

# Example: add a tessdata_best file
COPY chi_tra_vert.traineddata /usr/share/tesseract-ocr/<data version>/tessdata/

Alternately, you can copy training data into a Docker container as follows:

docker cp mycustomtraining.traineddata name_of_container:/usr/share/tesseract-ocr/<tesseract version>/tessdata/

Executing the test suite

The OCRmyPDF test suite is installed with image. To run it:

docker run --entrypoint python3  jbarlow83/ocrmypdf -m pytest

Accessing the shell

To use the bash shell in the Docker image:

docker run -it --entrypoint bash  jbarlow83/ocrmypdf

Using the OCRmyPDF web service wrapper

The OCRmyPDF Docker image includes an example, barebones HTTP web service. The webservice may be launched as follows:

docker run --entrypoint python3 -p 5000:5000  jbarlow83/ocrmypdf webservice.py

This will configure the machine to listen on port 5000. On Linux machines this is port 5000 of localhost. On macOS or Windows machines running Docker, this is port 5000 of the virtual machine that runs your Docker images. You can find its IP address using the command docker-machine ip.

Unlike command line usage this program will open a socket and wait for connections.

Warning

The OCRmyPDF web service wrapper is intended for demonstration or development. It provides no security, no authentication, no protection against denial of service attacks, and no load balancing. The default Flask WSGI server is used, which is intended for development only. The server is single-threaded and so can respond to only one client at a time. While running OCR, it cannot respond to any other clients.

Clients must keep their open connection while waiting for OCR to complete. This may entail setting a long timeout; this interface is more useful for internal HTTP API calls.

Unlike the rest of OCRmyPDF, this web service is licensed under the Affero GPLv3 (AGPLv3) since Ghostscript is also licensed in this way.

In addition to the above, please read our general remarks on using OCRmyPDF as a service.