PDF Tools

A self-hosted PDF workbench for organizing, editing, securing, converting, repairing, and comparing documents.

PDF Tools keeps processing on infrastructure you control. Its React workspace submits cancellable jobs to a Spring Boot service, streams progress, and returns expiring artifacts.

Highlights

• Organize pages with merge, split, extract, remove, rotate, crop, and reorder tools.
• Mark up and secure files with editing, watermarks, signatures, redaction, and encryption.
• Convert between PDF, Office, images, HTML, Markdown, and archival PDF/A formats.
• Run bounded native conversion workers without network access.

See the operation guides for the complete tool catalog and behavior details.

Quick start

Docker with Compose is required.

git clone https://github.com/mbianchidev/pdf-tools.git
cd pdf-tools
docker compose up --build

Open http://localhost. Start at http://localhost/new to load a document and choose a workflow. The backend API is available locally at http://localhost:8080/api/v1.

For local development, configuration, clean builds, and validation commands, follow the development guide.

Documentation

• Documentation index
• Architecture
• Jobs API v1
• Product principles
• Design system
• Backend guide
• Frontend guide
• HTML converter sidecar

Stack

React 19 and Vite 8 power the frontend. Java 25 and Spring Boot 4.1 provide the API, with PostgreSQL for job metadata and local or S3-compatible streaming artifact storage.

Project

Contributing · Security · Support · Code of Conduct · MIT License