Step 1: Sign in — Paperless-ngx Walkthrough

Find your URL and admin password from the stack outputs and sign in to Paperless-ngx

Step 1 of 4 • 2 minutes

Step 1 2 minutes

Sign in and see the dashboard

Find your Paperless URL and admin password from the CloudFormation outputs, then sign in.

Find PaperlessUrl, AdminUsername, AdminPassword and CloudWatchLogsUrl in the CloudFormation Outputs tab

All four containers (paperless, gotenberg, tika, init) write to a single CloudWatch log group — useful when troubleshooting the consumer pipeline

The Paperless-ngx login page — credentials come from the AdminUsername and AdminPassword stack outputs

After signing in, the dashboard surfaces the inbox tag and recent saved views

Expected outcome

• ✓ CloudFormation stack shows CREATE_COMPLETE status
• ✓ PaperlessUrl, AdminUsername and AdminPassword outputs are visible
• ✓ You can sign in and see the Paperless-ngx dashboard

How to find your URL and credentials

1. Open the CloudFormation console

   Go to CloudFormation in us-east-1.

2. Find your stack

   Look for a stack with paperless-ngx in the name. The status should be CREATE_COMPLETE.

3. Open the Outputs tab

   Click the stack name, then select the Outputs tab. You'll see:

   Output	What it is
   PaperlessUrl	CloudFront HTTPS URL for the Paperless-ngx UI
   ChatUrl	Chat-with-archive URL — you'll use this in Step 4
   AdminUsername	admin
   AdminPassword	A 16-character password (shown in plain text)
   CloudWatchLogsUrl	Direct link to logs for paperless / tika / gotenberg / init containers

4. Sign in

   Open the PaperlessUrl in a new tab. Enter admin and the value from AdminPassword.

   You'll land on the dashboard, with the inbox tag and a few saved views down the left.

What's already happening behind the scenes: the init container generated 36 sample parish documents and dropped them into the EFS consume folder. Paperless's consumer is OCR'ing each one (Tesseract for PDFs, Apache Tika for emails, Gotenberg for .docx and .odt), and the post-consume hook is calling Amazon Nova Pro to title, tag and classify each document. Most documents will be fully classified within 2 to 3 minutes of stack completion.

Troubleshooting: dashboard is empty

If the dashboard shows no documents yet:

• The consumer pipeline takes a few seconds per document — give it 2 to 3 minutes after stack completion.
• Click Documents in the left nav to see them appear as they're processed.
• Check the CloudWatchLogsUrl output and look at the paperless stream prefix for any consumer errors.

Troubleshooting: AdminPassword shows {{resolve:secretsmanager:...}}

If AdminPassword in the Outputs tab shows a literal string like {{resolve:secretsmanager:...}} rather than the password value, fetch it directly from Secrets Manager:

1. Open the Secrets Manager console in us-east-1.
2. Find the secret with AdminPasswordSecret in the name.
3. Click Retrieve secret value — the password is the value of the ADMIN_PASSWORD key.

Need help?

If you're stuck, check the troubleshooting section or contact us.

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