paperless-ngx

What This Skill Does

The paperless-ngx skill for OpenClaw provides a powerful command-line interface to interact with your Paperless-ngx document management system. It acts as an bridge between your local AI agent and your private document archive. By leveraging the Paperless-ngx REST API, this skill allows you to index, search, upload, retrieve, and organize thousands of documents effortlessly. Whether you are searching for specific invoices, extracting OCR text content for analysis, or automating the filing of new documents, this skill transforms your document management from a manual chore into an automated, AI-assisted workflow. It supports granular metadata management, including assigning tags, identifying correspondents, and classifying document types.

Installation

To install this skill, run the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/madmantim/paperless-docs. Once installed, you must configure your environment to allow the skill to authenticate with your instance. Navigate to ~/.clawdbot/clawdbot.json and provide your PAPERLESS_URL and PAPERLESS_TOKEN. You can generate a dedicated API token via your Paperless web UI by visiting Settings → Users & Groups → your-user → Generate Token. Alternatively, you can configure these details directly within the skills.entries.paperless-ngx section of your configuration file.

Use Cases

• Automated Expense Tracking: Automatically upload PDFs to Paperless-ngx and tag them as 'unpaid' for monthly accounting audits.
• Content Extraction for AI Analysis: Use the get.mjs script with the --content flag to feed raw document text directly into OpenClaw for summarization or data extraction.
• Archiving Correspondence: Quickly search for documents from specific correspondents like banks or utility providers using the integrated search filters.
• Bulk Document Organization: Use the script interface to programmatically rename or re-tag documents based on OCR data or existing metadata.

Example Prompts

1. "Search for my electricity bill from AGL dated December 2025 and list the details including the OCR text content."
2. "Upload the file located at ~/invoices/new_tax_doc.pdf, tag it as 'tax-deductible', and assign it to the correspondent 'IRS'."
3. "List all my document tags to see what categories I currently have available in Paperless-ngx."

Tips & Limitations

• Security: Always use a non-admin API token with restricted permissions if possible.
• Performance: Large document sets may require specific filtering; avoid broad searches without tags or types if you experience latency.
• Pathing: Ensure the baseDir is correctly set in your environment, as all interaction scripts are located within the scripts/ subdirectory of the skill path.
• Integrity: When uploading, double-check your title parameters, as incorrect metadata can make later retrieval harder despite the full-text search capabilities.