Running Tika in Docker

The project publishes two images on Docker Hub: apache/tika (the REST server, port 9998) and apache/tika-grpc (the gRPC server, port 9090).

docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:9998:9998 apache/tika:X.Y.Z
curl -T document.pdf http://localhost:9998/tika
Bind to 127.0.0.1 unless you mean otherwise. Docker writes its own iptables rules, so -p 9998:9998 can publish the server to the internet past a host firewall. Tika parses untrusted input by design — see Security.

Choosing an image

Variant Contents

apache/tika:<version>

Minimal. A JRE and the tika-server-standard distribution — every pure-Java parser, nothing external.

apache/tika:<version>-full

Adds the external tools some parsers shell out to: Tesseract OCR (with eng, ita, fra, spa, deu, jpn language packs), GDAL, ImageMagick, and the Liberation / FreeFont / msttcorefonts font sets. Considerably larger.

apache/tika-grpc:<version>

gRPC server on port 9090, with OCR, GDAL and fonts included.

Take -full if you OCR scanned documents or parse geospatial rasters; otherwise take minimal.

Tags come in three forms: <version> rolls forward if the image is rebuilt for the same Tika release, <version>-<N> is immutable and is what to pin in production, and latest tracks the newest stable release. The apache/tika images — minimal and -full alike — are published for linux/amd64, linux/arm64 and linux/s390x; apache/tika-grpc is published for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 only. docker pull picks the right one.

What is inside

Knowing the layout matters as soon as you mount anything.

Path or setting Value

/opt/tika-server

The unzipped distribution: the server jar, lib/, and plugins/. Also the working directory.

/tika-extras

On the classpath, empty by default. Mount a directory of extra jars here.

Process user

UID/GID 35002:35002, not root. Mounted files must be readable, and any directory the server writes to must be writable, by that UID.

Entry point

TikaServerCli -h 0.0.0.0, plus whatever you pass as the container command. The bind host is already set, so do not pass -h again.

Configuration

Mount a tika-config.json and point the server at it with -c. Anything after the image name is appended to the entry point.

docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:9998:9998 \
  -v "$(pwd)/tika-config.json:/tika-config.json" \
  apache/tika:X.Y.Z-full -c /tika-config.json

For example, to keep the full image’s parsers but turn OCR off:

{
  "parsers": [
    { "default-parser": {} },
    { "tesseract-ocr-parser": { "skipOcr": true } }
  ]
}

See Configuration for the file format.

Extra jars

Mount a directory of jars at /tika-extras — it is already on the container’s classpath, and the jars are forwarded to the forked JVMs as well.

docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:9998:9998 -v "$(pwd)/my-jars:/tika-extras" \
  apache/tika:X.Y.Z-full

Treat that directory as a trusted code location: whatever is in it runs with the full privileges of the Tika process. Outside Docker the equivalent is the tika.extras.dir system property.

Pipes plugins

/tika, /rmeta, /meta and /unpack work out of the box. The pipes endpoints (/pipes, /async) need the fetcher and emitter plugins for whatever they talk to. The image ships tika-pipes-file-system under /opt/tika-server/plugins/; mount any other plugin into that directory, one subdirectory per plugin.

docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:9998:9998 \
  -v "$(pwd)/tika-pipes-s3:/opt/tika-server/plugins/tika-pipes-s3" \
  -v "$(pwd)/tika-config.json:/tika-config.json" \
  apache/tika:X.Y.Z -c /tika-config.json

See Pipes Plugins.

Memory

The JVM sizes its heap from the container’s memory limit, so set the limit rather than passing -Xmx. Tika Pipes forks JVMs inside the same container, and each fork’s heap comes out of that same limit — size for the forks, not just the parent. See Forked-JVM CPU and Heap Sizing.

docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:9998:9998 --memory 4g apache/tika:X.Y.Z

Docker Compose

Worked compositions live in tika-server/docker-build: docker-compose-tika-vision.yml (a VLM parser against a local Ollama server), docker-compose-tika-grobid.yml, and docker-compose-tika-customocr.yml. Their configs are under sample-configs/.

services:
  tika:
    image: apache/tika:latest-full
    command: -c /tika-config.json
    restart: on-failure
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:9998:9998"
    volumes:
      - ./tika-config.json:/tika-config.json

Building the images yourself

The Dockerfile`s are in the source tree under `tika-server/docker-build/ (minimal/ and full/) and tika-grpc/docker-build/. They download the signed release zip from an Apache mirror and verify it against the project KEYS file, so a build needs a released TIKA_VERSION — they do not build from your working tree. Maintainers publishing official images should follow Releasing Tika Docker Images.