scanservjs

scanservjs is a web-based UI for your scanner. It allows you to share one or more scanners (using SANE) on a network without the need for drivers or complicated installation. It enables easy cropping, sources, resolution, output formats (TIF, JPG, PNG, PDF and TXT with Tesseract OCR) with varying compression settings, all of which can be configured. It supports multipage scanning and all SANE compatible devices.

Copyright 2016-2021 Sam Strachan

Requirements

• SANE Scanner
• Linux host (or VM with necessary pass-through e.g. USB)
• Software sane-utils, ImageMagick, Tesseract (optional) and nodejs

Installation notes

For an easy docker-based install (assuming that SANE supports your scanner out-of-the-box on Debian) use the following commands:

docker pull sbs20/scanservjs:latest
docker rm --force scanservjs-container 2> /dev/null
docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -v /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus --restart unless-stopped --name scanservjs-container --privileged sbs20/scanservjs:latest

scanservjs will now be accessible from http://$host:8080/

• ⚠ By default, configuration and scanned images are stored within the container and will be lost if you recreate it. If you want to map your scanned images then specify the volume mapping option -v /local/path/:/app/data/output/
• ⚠ The docker image is amd64 only - and will not work on ARM devices such as the Raspberry Pi. Please follow the manual installation process in these cases
• ⚠ --privileged is required for the container to access the host's devices, to allow it to talk to the scanner. The best way to do this is to map the actual USB ports. Run sudo sane-find-scanner -q and you will get a result like found USB scanner (vendor=0x04a9 [Canon], product=0x220d [CanoScan], chip=LM9832/3) at libusb:001:003. This translates to /dev/bus/usb/001/003. In turn the docker argument would be --device=/dev/bus/usb/001/003:/dev/bus/usb/001/003. However, oftentimes, there are reports that devices change address across reboots which complicates matters.

If you want to install the latest staging branch (this may contain newer code)

docker pull sbs20/scanservjs:staging
docker rm --force scanservjs-container 2> /dev/null
docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -v /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus --restart unless-stopped --name scanservjs-container --privileged sbs20/scanservjs:staging

More installation options:

• Manual installation notes
• Development notes
• Configuring the scanner and SANE

Environment variables

• SANED_NET_HOSTS: If you want to use a SaneOverNetwork scanner then to perform the equivalent of adding hosts to /etc/sane.d/net.conf specify a list of ip addresses separated by semicolons in the SANED_NET_HOSTS environment variable.
• AIRSCAN_DEVICES: If you want to specifically add sane-airscan devices to your /etc/sane.d/airscan.conf then use the AIRSCAN_DEVICES environment variable (semicolon delimited).
• DELIMITER: if you need to inlcude semi-colons (;) in your environment variables, this allows you to choose an alternative delimiter.
• DEVICES: Force add devices use DEVICES (semicolon delimited)
• SCANIMAGE_LIST_IGNORE: To force ignore scanimage -L

Configuration override

If you want to override some specific configuration setting then you can do so within ./config/config.local.js. Using docker you will need to map the volume using -v /my/local/path/:/app/config/ then create a file in your directory called config.local.js. See example source for more options.

module.exports = {
  afterConfig(config) {
    // Set default preview resolution
    config.previewResolution = 300;

    // Add a custom print pipeline
    config.pipelines.push({
      extension: 'pdf',
      description: 'Print PDF',
      commands: [
        'convert @- -quality 92 tmp-%04d.jpg && ls tmp-*.jpg',
        'convert @- scan-0000.pdf',
        'lp -d MY_PRINTER scan-0000.pdf',
        'ls scan-*.*'
      ]
    });
  }
};

Airscan

sane-airscan uses Avahi / Zeroconf / Bonjour to discover devices on the local network. If you are running docker you will want to share dbus to make it work (-v /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus).

Example docker run

Use airscan and a locally detected scanner

This should support most use cases

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 \
  -v /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus \
  --name scanservjs-container --privileged scanservjs-image

Complicated

Add two net hosts to sane, use airscan to connect to two remote scanners, don't use scanimage -L, force a list of devices and override the OCR language

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 \
  -e SANED_NET_HOSTS="10.0.100.30;10.0.100.31" \
  -e AIRSCAN_DEVICES='"Canon MFD" = "http://192.168.0.10/eSCL";"EPSON MFD" = "http://192.168.0.11/eSCL"' \
  -e SCANIMAGE_LIST_IGNORE=true \
  -e DEVICES="net:10.0.100.30:plustek:libusb:001:003;net:10.0.100.31:plustek:libusb:001:003;airscan:e0:Canon TR8500 series;airscan:e1:EPSON Cool Series" \
  -e OCR_LANG="fra" \
  -v /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus \
  --name scanservjs-container --privileged scanservjs-image

Why?

This is yet another scanimage-web-front-end. Why? It originally started as an adaptation of phpsane - just to make everything a bit newer, give it a refresh and make it work on minimal installations without imagemagick - that version is still available but is no longer maintained. Since then, I just wanted to write it in node and enhance it a bit, and it's been a labour of love ever since.

Acknowledgements

• This project owes its genesis to phpsane

More about SANE

• http://www.sane-project.org/