Install DocuBrowse

Packages for Linux (RPM, DEB, tarball), Windows (zip) and macOS (dmg). Download from the GitHub Releases page. For the full step-by-step guide, see INSTALL.md.

System requirements

	Minimum	Recommended
RAM	8 GB	12 GB
CPU	x86_64 or ARM64	x86_64 or ARM64
GPU	None (synopsis is slower)	4 GB+ vRAM (NVIDIA or Apple Silicon)
Disk	2 GB free plus your documents and index	—

32-bit systems are not supported (Ollama does not ship 32-bit builds). A modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) is used for the UI.

Install

Fedora / RHEL

sudo dnf install ./docubrowser-foss-<VERSION>-<RELEASE>.noarch.rpm

Debian / Ubuntu / Mint

sudo apt install ./docubrowser-foss_<VERSION>-<RELEASE>_all.deb

Any Linux (tarball)

tar xzf docubrowser-foss-<VERSION>-<RELEASE>.tar.gz
cd docubrowser-foss-<VERSION>-<RELEASE>
sudo ./install.sh

All Linux methods install to /opt/docubrowser/ with a Python virtualenv, CLI wrappers at /usr/bin/docubrowser and /usr/bin/docuback, and a desktop menu entry under Office.

Windows

Extract the zip and double-click Install.bat. Requires Python 3.9+ and Ollama pre-installed. Installs to %USERPROFILE%\DocuBrowse with a Start Menu shortcut; no admin rights needed. You may need to log out and back in for the shortcut to appear.

macOS

Open the dmg and double-click Install.command (right-click → Open the first time, since the scripts are unsigned). Requires Python 3.9+. Installs to ~/Applications/DocuBrowse/ with CLI wrappers and a DocuBrowse.app launcher.

First run

docubrowser rescan   # scan and index your documents
docubrowser start    # start the server
docubrowser open     # open the UI in your browser

start checks that Ollama is installed, running, and has both required models (nomic-embed-text:latest for embeddings and dolphin3:latest for synopsis), then installs, starts or pulls whatever is missing.

No document directory is configured by default. Click the gear icon in the web UI, or set doc_dir in docubrowse.config, before the first scan.

Language: DocuBrowse starts in English. On the first docubrowser start in a terminal it asks which language you want (English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified or Traditional Chinese), and you can change it any time in Settings. See Languages.

Prerequisites

Packaged installs pull in Python dependencies from requirements.txt. For a cloned repo you need Python 3.9+ and:

pdfplumber, pypdf: PDF extraction
python-docx, python-pptx, openpyxl: Office files
ebooklib, beautifulsoup4, mobi: e-books
striprtf: RTF (without it .rtf is indexed metadata-only)
psutil: hardware detection
Calibre: required for MOBI/AZW3/AZW (sudo dnf install calibre or sudo apt install calibre)
libvisio-tools (optional): body text from legacy binary Visio files
DjVuLibre (optional): text from DjVu files
Ollama: installed automatically by docubrowser start if missing

Uninstall

sudo dnf remove docubrowser-foss       # RPM
sudo apt remove docubrowser-foss       # DEB
sudo ./uninstall.sh                    # tarball

Windows: double-click Uninstall.bat. macOS: double-click Uninstall.command.

Troubleshooting

Ollama not starting

ollama serve
ollama list
ollama pull nomic-embed-text:latest
ollama pull dolphin3:latest

Scan progress appears stuck

tail -f /var/log/docubrowser.log
# or
tail -f ~/.local/share/docubrowser/docubrowser.log

Inotify watch limit

Large collections may log inotify watch limit reached. It is safe to ignore. To silence it, raise fs.inotify.max_user_instances to 256 or 512 in /etc/sysctl.conf, then run sudo sysctl -p.

Scanned (image-only) PDFs

They are indexed with a placeholder and listed in ocr_list_pdfs.txt, but won't match searches until OCR is run.