> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://icij.gitbook.io/datashare/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://icij.gitbook.io/datashare/server-mode/add-documents-from-the-cli.md).

# Add documents from the CLI

The shortest path from an empty project to searchable documents on a server install.

**This document assumes that you have installed Datashare** [**in server mode within Docker**](/datashare/server-mode/install-with-docker.md)**.**

In server [mode](/datashare/concepts/running-modes.md), Datashare has no web interface to add documents. Documents are added from the command line.

Here is the shortest command that scans a directory and indexes its files:

```bash
docker compose exec datashare /entrypoint.sh \
  stage run \
  --stages SCAN,INDEX \
  --defaultProject secret-project \
  --elasticsearchAddress http://elasticsearch:9200 \
  --dataDir /home/datashare/Datashare/
```

What is happening:

* Datashare runs the SCAN and INDEX [stages](/datashare/concepts/cli-stages.md) together, SCAN filling a queue with the files it finds and INDEX draining it.
* Files are read from `/home/datashare/Datashare/`, which is a directory mounted from the host machine, so this is the path **inside the container**.
* Extracted documents are written to the `secret-project` index in Elasticsearch.

Once the command exits, your documents are searchable.

{% hint style="warning" %}
That command is fine for a first try on a small directory. For a real corpus, add at least `--reportName` (so the run can resume) and `--queueType REDIS` (so the queue survives the process), and decide whether you want OCR. All of that is covered in [Indexing](/datashare/server-mode/indexing.md).
{% endhint %}

## Next steps

* [Indexing](/datashare/server-mode/indexing.md): the full guide to indexing on a server.
  * [Scenarios](/datashare/server-mode/indexing/scenarios.md): incremental updates, resuming, distributing across machines, mail archives.
  * [Options](/datashare/server-mode/indexing/options.md): every command-line flag, environment variable and settings key.
  * [Tuning](/datashare/server-mode/indexing/tuning.md): parallelism, OCR, memory and Elasticsearch.
  * [Troubleshooting](/datashare/server-mode/indexing/troubleshooting.md): what the errors mean.
* [Add entities from the CLI](/datashare/server-mode/add-entities-from-the-cli.md): extract people, organizations and locations from documents you have indexed.


---

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