PdfDing on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

PdfDing is an open source, self-hosted PDF manager, viewer and editor that gives you a private, browser-based home for your documents. Upload your PDFs, organise them with hierarchical tags, and read them in a built in viewer that remembers where you left off in every file. You can annotate and highlight as you read, mark documents as favourites, search across your library, and share individual documents by link or QR code when you need to hand something to someone else. Because it is self-hosted, your documents stay on infrastructure you control rather than in a third party cloud.

This image delivers PdfDing fully installed as a Django application in a dedicated Python virtual environment, served by gunicorn and reverse-proxied behind nginx, with the complete browser frontend already compiled. The in-browser reader is a common source of trouble in do it yourself installations because its assets are generated at packaging time rather than shipped in the source tree, so they are built and verified here as part of the image. Your PDF library is operational within minutes of launch with no virtual environment wiring, no asset pipeline to run and no reverse proxy to configure.

The image is hardened to be secure by default. No shared or default credential ever ships. On the first boot of every VM a fresh application secret key is generated and a single administrator account is created with a unique, randomly generated password, written to a root-only file on the instance. The application is bound to the loopback interface and reached only through nginx, self-service registration is closed by default so a public facing instance cannot be enrolled into by strangers, and host settings are configured so that sign-in works on the public IP address or a custom domain without a baked-in hostname. An unauthenticated health endpoint is provided for load-balancer probes.

Systemd manages gunicorn and nginx for automatic restarts and clean logging, the OS is fully patched at build time and continues to receive unattended security updates, and 24/7 cloudimg support is included.

This is a repackaged open source software product with additional charges for cloudimg support services. PdfDing is a trademark of its respective owners. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.