Self-Hosting Stirling PDF for Document Processing

Stirling PDF is a powerful self-hosted web application for PDF manipulation. It provides a clean interface for merging, splitting, converting, and processing PDF files without uploading them to third-party services.

Docker Deployment

# docker-compose.yml
version: "3.8"
services:
  stirling-pdf:
    image: frooodle/s-pdf:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - ./training_data:/usr/share/tessdata
      - ./configs:/configs
    environment:
      - DOCKER_ENABLE_SECURITY=false
      - INSTALL_BOOK_AND_ADVANCED_HTML_OPS=false

Features

• Merge multiple PDFs into one document
• Split PDFs by page ranges
• Convert between PDF, images, and other formats
• OCR support for scanned documents
• Add watermarks and signatures
• Compress PDFs to reduce file size

Reverse Proxy Setup

# Nginx configuration
server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name pdf.example.com;
    
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        client_max_body_size 100M;
    }
}

Summary

Stirling PDF provides a privacy-friendly alternative to online PDF tools. All processing happens on your server, keeping sensitive documents secure.