BentoPDF — Privacy-First Self-Hosted PDF Toolkit

Introduction

BentoPDF bundles the most common PDF operations into a single self-hosted web app. Because everything runs on your own server, sensitive documents never leave your network.

What BentoPDF Does

• Merges multiple PDF files into a single document
• Splits PDFs by page ranges or extracts individual pages
• Converts images (JPG, PNG) to PDF and PDF pages to images
• Performs OCR on scanned documents to make text searchable
• Compresses PDF file sizes while preserving readability

Architecture Overview

BentoPDF is a JavaScript and TypeScript application using pdf-lib, Tesseract.js, and other libraries for PDF manipulation. The web frontend provides a drag-and-drop interface that communicates with a backend API. All processing happens server-side in the container.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Deploy with a single Docker command, no external database needed
• Configure upload size limits via environment variables
• Mount a volume if you want to persist processed files
• Place behind a reverse proxy for TLS and access control
• Customize the UI theme through configuration options

Key Features

• All-in-one PDF operations in a single web interface
• Privacy-first: files are processed locally and never leave your server
• OCR support for extracting text from scanned PDFs
• Batch processing for handling multiple files at once
• Lightweight container with minimal system requirements

Comparison with Similar Tools

• Stirling PDF — similar self-hosted PDF toolkit with a broader feature set
• ILovePDF — cloud-hosted service that processes files on external servers; BentoPDF keeps files local
• Smallpdf — freemium cloud service with usage limits; BentoPDF is free and unlimited
• pdftk — CLI-only tool; BentoPDF provides a graphical web interface
• ConvertX — general file converter; BentoPDF specializes in PDF-specific operations

FAQ

Q: Does BentoPDF require a database? A: No, it runs without an external database. File processing is stateless.

Q: What OCR languages are supported? A: BentoPDF uses Tesseract for OCR and supports multiple languages. Additional language packs can be added to the container.

Q: Is there a file size limit? A: The default limit is configurable. Since you host it yourself, you can set it as high as your server resources allow.

Q: Can I use BentoPDF for batch operations? A: Yes, you can upload and process multiple files in a single operation through the web interface.

Sources

• https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf