Deploying Stirling PDF on a VPS: A Docker Setup Guide

Stirling PDF is an open-source PDF platform with more than 60 tools — merge, split, OCR, sign, redact, convert — that runs entirely on a server you control instead of a third-party website. It ships as a single Docker container, so getting it running on a VPS mostly comes down to picking the right image variant and giving it enough RAM to work with.

What Stirling PDF Can Do

Stirling PDF started as a way to avoid paying for a PDF editor just to sign one document, and it has grown into a genuine Acrobat alternative: merging and splitting, compression, OCR on scanned pages, redaction, digital signatures, format conversion in both directions, and a REST API that exposes nearly every tool for automation. The core platform is MIT-licensed and free to self-host for good — an open-core company sells an optional paid tier on top for things like local AI models and SSO, but none of that is required to run the toolkit itself.

Under the hood it’s a Java application built on Spring Boot, using Apache PDFBox to do the actual PDF manipulation. That matters for hosting decisions: unlike a static site or a lightweight script, this is a real backend service with a JVM warming up behind it.

Installing Stirling PDF with Docker on a VPS

The project publishes a ready-to-use image, so the fastest path is Docker Compose rather than a manual build. A minimal setup looks like this:

services:
  stirling-pdf:
    image: stirlingtools/stirling-pdf:latest
    container_name: stirling-pdf
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - ./stirling/trainingData:/usr/share/tessdata
      - ./stirling/extraConfigs:/configs
      - ./stirling/customFiles:/customFiles
      - ./stirling/logs:/logs
    restart: unless-stopped

Run docker compose up -d, wait for the first boot to finish initializing (it takes noticeably longer than restarts once the JVM and OCR data are warmed up), then point a browser at the VPS’s IP address on port 8080. Put it behind a reverse proxy with TLS before exposing it to anything other than a private network — Stirling PDF handles the PDF work, not the transport security.

How Much VPS Stirling PDF Actually Needs

This is the detail that catches people who assume every self-hosted PDF tool is as light as a static file server. Stirling PDF’s Docker image is well over a gigabyte on disk, and because the Java backend stays resident, it holds onto real memory even sitting idle — noticeably more than a typical lightweight container. OCR and format-conversion jobs (which shell out to Tesseract and LibreOffice under the hood) push CPU and memory harder still while they run. Budget accordingly rather than sizing this like a simple static app.

Why Self-Host Stirling PDF on an Unmanaged Contabo VPS

Everything above is on you: pulling the image, configuring the reverse proxy, applying updates, backing up the customFiles and configs volumes. A Contabo VPS gives you the compute and the root access to do exactly that — it doesn’t run, patch, or babysit Stirling PDF on your behalf. For a single-user or small-team deployment, a Cloud VPS 6 (12 GB RAM) gives the JVM comfortable headroom; if OCR or bulk conversion jobs are a regular part of your workflow, stepping up to a Cloud VPS 8 (24 GB RAM) avoids the backend fighting itself for memory during a batch run. Both sit on Contabo’s Core line, built around RAM-per-Euro rather than the thinnest possible allocation.

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