DropWizard Tika Server

This provides a DropWizard wrapper around Apache Tika, allowing documents of many types to be converted into plain text, wrapped in JSON.

Building

To build the application, use the following maven command:

mvn clean package

This will build a jar file containing all of the required dependencies in the target directory.

Note: If you are installing to Heroku, the recommendation is to not store dependencies in the default maven repository. In this case, uncomment the maven-dependency-plugin block in the pom.xml (under the plugins block).

Running the application

The application can be run from the command line using the following:

java -jar target/dropwizard-tika-server-0.1.jar server config/tika.yml

The given config file defines the ports the application will use, logging details, and authentication options.

Usage

The application has just one endpoint, with three sub-options:

http://localhost:8080/tika/metadata
http://localhost:8080/tika/fulldata
http://localhost:8080/tika/text

For each of these, the application expects a PUT request with the file passed in the request body. For example, using curl from the command line:

curl -T example.pdf http://localhost:8080/tika/metadata

Each option will return a JSON object with the following values:

{
  "status": "OK|ERROR",
  "msg": "Error message, if in error state, otherwise null",
  "metadata": {
    // Metadata here, if using metadata or fulldata options
  },
  "text": "Document text, if using text or fulldata options"
}

Note: by default, curl will add an "Expect: 100-Continue" header to the request which causes problems if running the application behind lighttpd. This can be disabled by adding your own empty "Expect" header, like so:

curl -H "Expect:" -T example.pdf http:://localhost:8080/tika/metadata

Authentication

To enable basic authentication, change the authentication.enabled parameter in the tika.yml configuration file to true. Once this is set, you will need to pass the required username and password as system parameters on the command line, like so:

java -DAUTH_USERNAME=user -DAUTH_PASSWORD=pass -jar dropwizard-tika-server-0.1.jar server config/tika.yml  

The system properties used may be changed if necessary in the config file.

Credits

This application was based upon gselva's Simple-Tika-Server, which unfortunately I was unable to get working as advertised. It seemed easier, since it hadn't been worked on for four years, to use it as the basis for a new application - I wasn't able to debug what was already there in the time available.