Why Paperless-NGX
For organisations moving from physical or shared-drive document management to a proper DMS, Paperless-NGX hits a rare sweet spot: it's genuinely powerful, self-hostable, and free. For NGOs with tight budgets and data residency concerns, it's often the right call over SaaS alternatives.
The Deployment Stack
- VPS: 4-core, 8GB RAM on a Kigali-based cloud provider (data residency requirement)
- Stack: Docker Compose with Paperless-NGX, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Nginx reverse proxy
- Auth: LDAP integration with the client's existing Active Directory
- Backup: Daily PostgreSQL dumps to S3-compatible storage
The LDAP Challenge
Paperless-NGX's LDAP support requires careful group-mapping configuration. We found that the PAPERLESSLDAPGROUPS_FILTER variable needed to be explicitly scoped to the OU containing programme staff a broad filter caused permission escalation issues during testing.
Training
We ran three half-day training sessions across departments. The key insight: staff didn't need to understand the system architecture. They needed three workflows: upload a document, find a document, share a document. Everything else was noise.
Results
98% of the organisation's active documents were digitised within 90 days. The remaining 2% were physical-only legal documents that required notarised copies, out of scope for digital-first migration.
