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Quick Start

This guide gets you from zero to searching your first document in under five minutes.

1. Start Pagepiper

./manage.sh start

Open http://localhost:8521 in your browser.

2. Add a document

You have two options:

Upload directly — click Upload PDF / EPUB in the library header and pick a file from your computer.

Scan a directory — set PAGEPIPER_WATCH_DIR in your .env to a folder of PDFs or EPUBs, then click Scan for PDFs. Pagepiper indexes every file it finds.

3. Wait for indexing

The document card shows progress while text is being extracted and embedded:

  • Extracting text... (animated bar) — PDF/EPUB is being parsed into page chunks
  • Embedding N / M pages (X%) (filling bar) — vectors are being written to the vector store (only when Ollama is configured)

Once the badge shows READY, the document is searchable.

Click Search in the navigation. Type any phrase and see ranked page excerpts with scores. Results are instant using BM25 full-text search — no Ollama required.

5. Chat (optional, requires Ollama)

See the Ollama Setup guide to enable hybrid vector search and LLM-powered chat. Once configured, the Chat tab lets you ask natural-language questions and get answers with page citations.