Logo Stirling PDF

Collaboration & Productivity

Stirling PDF

Every PDF operation you'll ever need — private, self-hosted, on your VPS.

Official documentation Source code

About Stirling PDF

Stirling PDF is the most-starred PDF application on GitHub (87 k+ stars, MIT licence, v2.14.2). It runs as a single lightweight Docker container and exposes a clean web UI where you — or your team — can perform 50+ PDF operations without installing anything on your computer: merge, split, rotate, compress, convert to/from Word and images, add watermarks, page numbers and signatures, redact sensitive content, and run OCR via Tesseract across dozens of languages.

Because it runs entirely on your VPS, no PDF ever leaves your network. There is no subscription, no usage cap, and no vendor lock-in. The Spring Boot Java container uses under 512 MB RAM at idle and handles multi-MB PDFs in seconds on a 1 vCPU VPS. Deploy it in one click from the ServOrbit marketplace and access it instantly from any browser.

What gets installed

Ready when the VPS starts

Compatible OS
Ubuntu 24.04
Application
Stirling PDF
Tech stack
DockerJavaSpring BootTesseract OCR
Minimum RAM
512 MB (2 GB recommended for OCR-heavy workloads)
Minimum CPU
1 vCPU
Default port
8080
Access
root over SSH

Key features

  • 50+ PDF operations: merge, split, rotate, compress, convert (Word, images, HTML), watermark, redact, sign
  • Tesseract OCR: turn scanned PDFs into searchable text in 100+ languages — including Arabic, French and English
  • PDF to Word / Word to PDF, PDF to images (JPG/PNG/TIFF), images to PDF — all in the browser
  • Password-protect or unlock PDFs, edit metadata, flatten annotations, compare two PDFs side-by-side
  • Add page numbers, headers, footers, bookmarks and Bates numbering in bulk
  • Single Docker container, < 512 MB RAM at idle — minimal VPS footprint
  • Open-source MIT licence — self-auditable, no telemetry, no phone-home after install

When to use this solution?

Document-heavy workflows

Law firms, accountants and consultants handle hundreds of PDFs a day. Stirling PDF gives your team a shared internal tool to merge contracts, compress reports before emailing, redact sensitive data and add watermarks — all without uploading documents to third-party SaaS.

Digitising paper documents

Upload scanned PDFs or JPEG photos of handwritten forms and run Tesseract OCR to produce searchable, copy-pasteable text. Supports Arabic, French and English out of the box — critical for Moroccan administrative documents.

Developer tooling

Automate PDF generation in your CI pipeline: call Stirling PDF's REST API to convert HTML invoices to PDF, merge multi-part documents, or compress build artefacts — without a third-party dependency or an API key.

Guide

Deploy Stirling PDF on your VPS

  1. Order a ServOrbit VPS

    Any Ubuntu 24.04 plan with 1 GB RAM or more works. Stirling PDF idles under 512 MB; a 2 GB plan handles heavy OCR jobs comfortably. No domain is involved: the app has no login screen, so it is reached through an SSH tunnel rather than published on a public address.

  2. One-click install from the marketplace

    Open your ServOrbit control panel, go to Marketplace → Collaboration & Productivité → Stirling PDF, and click Deploy. Docker pulls the image and the container starts automatically — no configuration needed.

  3. Open the web UI

    If a domain is attached to the app, open https://your-domain in your browser — with no port number. Without a domain there is no public access: open an SSH tunnel with ssh -L 8080:127.0.0.1:8080 root@<your-vps-ip> (8080 is the catalogue port, given as an example — use the port shown on your app's card in the client area), then browse to http://localhost:8080. The Stirling PDF home screen appears immediately — no login required in the default configuration, so enable authentication before exposing the instance on a public domain.

  4. Use any PDF tool

    Choose an operation from the sidebar: Merge PDFs, Compress, Convert to Word, OCR, Add Watermark, etc. Upload your file(s), click the action button, and download the result in seconds.

  5. Enable login (optional, recommended for teams)

    To restrict access to authorised users, SSH into your VPS and edit the Docker environment variable SECURITY_ENABLELOGIN=true in your compose file, then restart the container. Stirling PDF creates an admin account on first boot — credentials are shown in the container logs.

Frequently asked questions

Questions about Stirling PDF

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Stirling PDF is an open-source PDF manipulation suite (MIT licence) built with Java and Spring Boot. It runs as a single Docker container and exposes a web interface for 50+ PDF operations — merge, split, compress, convert, OCR, watermark, redact, sign and more. It is the #1 PDF application on GitHub by star count (87 k+ stars).

Embed the deploy button

Maintaining a project that uses Stirling PDF? This button lets your readers deploy it on a VPS in one click, without reading Docker documentation.

Deploy Stirling PDF on ServOrbit
Markdown
[![Deploy Stirling PDF on ServOrbit](https://servorbit.com/brand/deploy/button.svg)](https://servorbit.com/vps-cloud?template=stirling-pdf&utm_source=deploy-badge&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=stirling-pdf)
HTML
<a href="https://servorbit.com/vps-cloud?template=stirling-pdf&utm_source=deploy-badge&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=stirling-pdf"><img src="https://servorbit.com/brand/deploy/button.svg" alt="Deploy Stirling PDF on ServOrbit" height="40"></a>

The button points to a VPS order with the template preselected. The image is served from servorbit.com — nothing to host on your side.

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