For over a decade now I have been using Evernote with a wireless scanner to archive the various “important” snail mail items we get. I could drop a document into the scanner, it would upload that to a folder on my desktop mac, which in turn would cause a script to launch Evernote and add the document as a new note to the Inbox notebook.
The end result is anyone in the family could send a doc, receipt, etc. to Evernote with one button push and Evernote would OCR it so it was searchable. This worked great.
I am trying to move to self-hosting with Joplin and I desire to re-create this wonderful setup. Another problem is my scanner will no longer upload to my mac in the latest MacOS (Catalina).
Ok - here’s what I got set up:
GOAL: Drop a document into a scanner, hit scan, doc appears OCR’d in Joplin’s synced storage in Nextcloud.
My Setup:
- Intel NUC (headless) running Ubuntu and Docker
- I created a docker container with rest_uploader, all the dependencies for OCRing and Joplin CLI.
How I run it:
- Run
joplin &(starts an instance of the joplin CLI) - Run
joplin server start &(gets the clipper API running) - Run
rest_uploader /my_watch_dir
So at this point, when a new doc hits /my_watch_dir, it fires up rest_uploader, which OCRs the doc, and uploads to joplin server. The “regular” joplin instance ‘sees’ the new note and syncs with Nextcloud. My Mac syncs with nextcloud and so a few minutes after hitting “scan” I have what I want.
My question is - Is this the “simplest” I can make it? I have to run two instances of joplin (server and regular) to make this work… is there any way the server can “sync” without needing a second instance of Joplin? The Joplin CLI doesn’t seem to listen for the clipper API - or am I missing something?