Docling Serve

Running Docling as an API service.

Getting started

Install the docling-serve package and run the server.

# Using the python package
pip install "docling-serve"
docling-serve run

# Using container images, e.g. with Podman
podman run -p 5001:5001 quay.io/docling-project/docling-serve

The server is available at

• API http://127.0.0.1:5001
• API documentation http://127.0.0.1:5001/docs

Try it out with a simple conversion:

curl -X 'POST' \
  'http://localhost:5001/v1alpha/convert/source' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "http_sources": [{"url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17887"}]
  }'

Container images

Available container images:

Name	Description	Arch	Size
ghcr.io/docling-project/docling-serve quay.io/docling-project/docling-serve	Simple image for Docling Serve, installing all packages from the official pypi.org index.	linux/amd64, linux/arm64	3.6 GB
ghcr.io/docling-project/docling-serve-cpu quay.io/docling-project/docling-serve-cpu	Cpu-only image which installs torch from the pytorch cpu index.	linux/amd64, linux/arm64	3.6 GB
ghcr.io/docling-project/docling-serve-cu124 quay.io/docling-project/docling-serve-cu124	Cuda 12.4 image which installs torch from the pytorch cu124 index.	linux/amd64	8.7 GB

Coming soon: docling-serve-slim images will reduce the size by skipping the model weights download.

Demonstration UI

# Install the Python package with the extra dependencies
pip install "docling-serve[ui]"
docling-serve run --enable-ui

# Run the container image with the extra env parameters
podman run -p 5001:5001 -e DOCLING_SERVE_ENABLE_UI=true quay.io/docling-project/docling-serve

An easy to use UI is available at the /ui endpoint.

Documentation and advance usages

Visit the Docling Serve documentation for learning how to configure the webserver, use all the runtime options of the API and deployment examples.

Get help and support

Please feel free to connect with us using the discussion section.

Contributing

Please read Contributing to Docling Serve for details.

References

If you use Docling in your projects, please consider citing the following:

@techreport{Docling,
  author = {Docling Contributors},
  month = {1},
  title = {Docling: An Efficient Open-Source Toolkit for AI-driven Document Conversion},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17887},
  eprint = {2501.17887},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2501.17887},
  version = {2.0.0},
  year = {2025}
}

License

The Docling Serve codebase is under MIT license.

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Docling has been brought to you by IBM.