JavaOtherCreated Jan 27, 2023Last push todayLatest release v3.0.2+444 stars this week+2.3K this month
Quick answers
What is Stirling-PDF?
A comprehensive, self-hosted open-source platform offering deep PDF manipulation and conversion tools without external dependencies.
What does Stirling-PDF do?
Stirling PDF is a highly capable open-source document manipulation platform that empowers users to perform comprehensive edits, conversions, and automation on PDF files locally. It operates primarily as a Dockerized web application, ensuring sensitive documents are fully processed locally without ever pinging external cloud services for heightened data security. The platform consolidates a massive array of utilities, allowing users to effortlessly merge, split, OCR, digitally sign, and deeply redact dense multi-page documents directly from their browser. By exposing a completely private internal API, developers can also seamlessly integrate complex PDF processing routines into their own self-hosted automation pipelines.
Who is Stirling-PDF for?
Privacy-conscious individuals, enterprises, and developers who need a powerful, fully locally-hosted solution for managing and editing PDF files securely.
How do I get started with Stirling-PDF?
docker run -p 8080:8080 stirlingtools/stirling-pdf
How popular is Stirling-PDF on GitHub?
Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF has 93,571 stars and 10,368 forks on GitHub, and gained 444 stars in the last 7 days.
What license does Stirling-PDF use?
Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF is released under the Other license.
Star history
since Jul 28, 2026
93.6K stars as of Oct 4, 2026. Measured daily since Jul 28, 2026; GitHub no longer exposes earlier star timestamps.
Contribution activity
commits per day, last 52 weeks
1,899 commits in the last yearLessMore
Signals and awards
derived from tracked data
Landmark project
93,571 stars
Very active
1,899 commits in 52 weeks
Community-driven
~314 contributors
Well documented
High community health score
Continuous integration
Automated checks passing
Top 10% tracked
Rank 81 of 1135
What Stirling-PDF does
Stirling PDF is a highly capable open-source document manipulation platform that empowers users to perform comprehensive edits, conversions, and automation on PDF files locally. It operates primarily as a Dockerized web application, ensuring sensitive documents are fully processed locally without ever pinging external cloud services for heightened data security. The platform consolidates a massive array of utilities, allowing users to effortlessly merge, split, OCR, digitally sign, and deeply redact dense multi-page documents directly from their browser. By exposing a completely private internal API, developers can also seamlessly integrate complex PDF processing routines into their own self-hosted automation pipelines.
Privacy-conscious individuals, enterprises, and developers who need a powerful, fully locally-hosted solution for managing and editing PDF files securely.
Total Privacy: Ensures all document processing, OCR, and redaction happens completely locally on your hardware without external API calls.
Comprehensive Editing Toolset: Enables deep structural changes to files including merging, splitting, signing, and granular page reordering.
Advanced OCR Integration: Converts scanned images into fully searchable and selectable text documents seamlessly using localized processing.
Private Developer API: Exposes a comprehensive local web API allowing complex PDF transformation routines to be automated securely.
Multi-Environment Deployment: Supports running natively as a desktop application, directly in the browser, or as a self-hosted Docker container.
Extensive Format Conversion: Converts documents fluidly back and forth between PDF and numerous image, word, or structured text formats.
Where teams use it
Secure Document Redaction
Legal professionals utilize the platform to completely locally redact sensitive personal information from case files without trusting cloud converters.
Automated OCR Pipelines
Developers deploy the Docker container to automatically ingest and parse incoming physical scans using the exposed local API.
Enterprise Document Standardization
IT departments host the application internally to provide all staff with a robust, highly secure unified PDF editor.
Rapid Batch Processing
Archivists utilize the comprehensive merging and splitting tools to organize and rapidly catalog massive historical document libraries offline.
Getting started: docker run -p 8080:8080 stirlingtools/stirling-pdf
README
main branch
Stirling PDF - The Open-Source PDF Platform
Stirling PDF is a powerful, open-source PDF editing platform. Run it as a personal desktop app, in the browser, or deploy it on your own servers with a private API. Edit, sign, redact, convert, and automate PDFs without sending documents to external services.
Key Capabilities
Everywhere you work - Desktop client, browser UI, and self-hosted server with a private API.
50+ PDF tools - Edit, merge, split, sign, redact, convert, OCR, compress, and more.
Automation & workflows - No-code pipelines direct in UI with APIs to process millions of PDFs.
Enterprise‑grade - SSO, auditing, and flexible on‑prem deployments.
Developer platform - REST APIs available for nearly all tools to integrate into your existing systems.
We welcome contributions! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.
This project uses Task as a unified command runner for all build, dev, and test commands. Run task dev to get started running the editor, run task to see the most common commands, or see the Developer Guide for full details.
This release contains bug fixes and various other improvements
Enhancements:
- add support for selective page cropping
- better tool recommendation based on user usage
- add visual feedback during page reordering
Bugs fixed:
- translations missing
- Certain languages not loading correctly
- Processor not correctly loading in certain versions of the app
- latest-fat having file upload issues
- Default mode as viewer/reader not correctly working
## What's Changed
### Bug Fixes
* fix: resolve i18n template placeholders in settings search results by @mvanhorn in https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/pull/6814
### Enhancements
* Re-enable typed linting and ban unnecessary type assertions by @jbrunton96 in https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/pull/8178
* enable local tool usage tracking by @Frooodle in https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/pull/8207
* Add limit to max depth for JSX by @jbrunton96 in https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/pull/8180
* feat(crop): add support for selective page cropping by @balazs-szucs in https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/pull/7753
* Update zh-TW Traditional Chinese locale by @Peter
Quick hotfixes for the following windows desktop bugs:
- Double Windows title bar showing
- temp log files growth
For all those interested in the big 3.0.0 release and all the cool features we added, check out here
https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/releases#release-v3.0.0
## What's Changed
### Bug Fixes
* fix(jpdfium): stop the backend gracefully and reclaim extraction dirs by @balazs-szucs in https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/pull/8202
### Enhancements
* Unify tool list and viewer bar icon colours; rename right sidebar header to PDF Tools by @reecebrowne in https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/pull/8190
* Fix double title bar on Windows desktop after upgrade by @Frooodle in https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/pull/8203
**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/compare/v3.0.0...v3.0.1
Stirling PDF V3.0 is live!
With this update we are introducing a lot of exciting new changes, A brand new automation system, Free OAuth SSO for all, brand new text editor and a ton of new features, bug fixes and security fixes
We have a new system along side the "PDF Editor" called the "PDF Processor"
The PDF Processor takes the tools you already use in Stirling PDF and lets you run them across a large numbers of files with a variety of sources (Folders/FTP/S3 etc)
The idea is, If you need to OCR 10,000 files, Compress a whole folder or convert a whole document library this should be a tool which can help with that and allow it to listen and run for future files as they arrive
This is the first major release of Processor and we will be improving it quickly based on how people use it.
[Full Processor guide with examples](https://docs.stirlingpdf.com/Processor/)
AI is also available as an optional part of Processor.
You can use AI to understand documents, classify them, extract information, and help automate processing. AI is fully optional (and off by default) and can use various models including locally/self-hosted models depending on your setup.
Automation now includes
Hotfix release for lots of bug fixes,
(Note we have identified some issues for mac users and hope to have another fix out in next few days)
The list below is of the main bug fixes are:
## Tool fixes
- fix merge split and other operations not working on Debian 12 and fedora 44
- Concurrent usage issues on certain tools like merge
- Automate issues for remove images fixed
- Large 2GB PDFs no longer crashes under set scenarios
## Desktop fixes
- Windows ARM64 test build
- linux startup fixes
We are planning a giant release in 2-3 weeks with some big exciting new features so keep on the lookout!
## What's Changed
* Redact: clear error instead of a 500 when no text patterns are given (cherrypicked) by @jbrunton96 in https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/pull/6972
* fix(temp-files): prevent cleanup of active registered directories by @Ludy87 in https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/pull/7006
* deps(frontend): upgrade @embedpdf packages to v2.14.4 by @Ludy87 in https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/pull/6989
* fix(admin-settings): correctly mask Telegram bot tokens in settings output by @Ludy87 in https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/
Server only hotfix for certain postgres connections having issues loading user data
**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/compare/v2.14.1...v2.14.2
Code frequency
additions and deletions
+3.7M lines added, -2.3M removed over the last year.
Commits per week
last 52 weeks
1.9K commits in the last 52 weeks.
When work happens
weekday and hour
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🤗 Transformers: the model-definition framework for state-of-the-art machine learning models in text, vision, audio, and multimodal models, for both inference and training.
