Self-hosting Stirling-PDF the easy way

Yulei Chen

4 min

Stirling-PDF is a powerful, self-hosted web application for PDF manipulation. It supports merging, splitting, converting, compressing, signing, adding watermarks, OCR, and dozens more operations. Everything runs on your own server, so your documents never leave your infrastructure. No file size limits, no subscriptions, no third-party access to your data.

Sliplane is a managed container platform that makes self-hosting painless. With one-click deployment, you can get Stirling-PDF up and running in minutes - no server setup, no reverse proxy config, no infrastructure to maintain.

Prerequisites

Before deploying, ensure you have a Sliplane account (free trial available).

Quick start

Sliplane provides one-click deployment with presets.

Deploy Stirling-PDF >

Click the deploy button above
Select a project
Select a server. If you just signed up you get a 48-hour free trial server
Click Deploy!

About the preset

The one-click deploy above uses Sliplane's Stirling-PDF preset. Here's what it includes:

Official stirlingtools/stirling-pdf Docker image
Specific version tag (0.33.0) for stability
Persistent storage for OCR training data (/usr/share/tesseract-ocr/5/tessdata), configs (/configs), custom files (/customFiles), and logs (/logs)
Security mode disabled by default for easy setup
Health check endpoint at /api/v1/info/status

Next steps

Once Stirling-PDF is running on Sliplane, access it using the domain Sliplane provided (e.g. stirling-pdf-xxxx.sliplane.app).

No login is required by default. Stirling-PDF launches with security disabled, so you can start using it right away.

Enabling authentication

If you want to add user authentication, set the DOCKER_ENABLE_SECURITY environment variable to true and redeploy. This enables login-based access control. The default admin credentials are:

Username: admin
Password: stirling

Change the admin password immediately after your first login. You can manage users from the admin panel inside the app.

Key environment variables

You can customize Stirling-PDF by adding environment variables in Sliplane's service settings:

Variable	Description	Default
`DOCKER_ENABLE_SECURITY`	Enable authentication and user management	`false`
`LANGS`	Comma-separated OCR languages to install (e.g. `en_GB,de_DE,fr_FR`)	English only
`INSTALL_BOOK_AND_ADVANCED_HTML_OPS`	Install LibreOffice for advanced conversion	`false`
`SYSTEM_DEFAULTLOCALE`	Set the default UI language (e.g. `en_GB`, `de_DE`)	`en_GB`

Adding OCR languages

Stirling-PDF uses Tesseract for OCR. English is included by default. To add more languages, set the LANGS environment variable. For example, en_GB,de_DE,fr_FR installs English, German, and French OCR support. The training data is persisted in a volume, so languages only need to download once.

Logging

Stirling-PDF writes logs to /logs/ inside the container. This path is backed by a persistent volume, so logs survive restarts. You can also view real-time logs through Sliplane's built-in log viewer. For general Docker logging tips, check out our post on how to use Docker logs.

Cost comparison

You can also self-host Stirling-PDF with other cloud providers. Here is a pricing comparison for the most common ones:

FAQ

What can Stirling-PDF do?

Stirling-PDF supports over 50 PDF operations including merge, split, compress, convert (to/from Word, Excel, images), add watermarks, rotate pages, OCR text extraction, digital signatures, and more. It also supports batch processing for handling multiple files at once.

How do I enable advanced file conversions?

Set the INSTALL_BOOK_AND_ADVANCED_HTML_OPS environment variable to true. This installs LibreOffice inside the container, enabling PDF-to-Word, Word-to-PDF, and other advanced format conversions. Note that this increases the container's startup time and memory usage. If you just need a lightweight LibreOffice instance, you can deploy it separately on Sliplane.