apache/tika

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

4011 stars · 958 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Apache Tika is a Java toolkit that detects file types and extracts text and metadata from over a thousand file formats (PDF, Office documents, etc.) through a single interface. It ships as an embeddable Java library, a CLI jar, a REST server, and a gRPC service, with 4.x adding Markdown output for LLM/RAG pipelines and crash-isolated forked parsing.

Use cases

• extract text from pdfs and office documents
• detect the real file type of an uploaded file
• index documents into elasticsearch or solr for search
• convert documents to markdown for LLM and RAG pipelines
• batch parse a directory of files with fault tolerance
• run a document parsing microservice over HTTP or gRPC
• extract metadata and embedded content from files

When to choose

• you need one API to parse many heterogeneous file formats
• you are building search indexing or content analysis pipelines
• you want LLM/RAG-ready Markdown extraction from documents
• you need robust parsing of untrusted files with process isolation

When to avoid

• you only need PDF parsing with fine-grained layout control (dedicated PDF libraries fit better)
• you cannot run Java 17 or a JVM in your environment
• you need lightweight, single-format extraction with minimal dependencies

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser ocr nlp search-engine etl cli http-server rpc files pdf developer-tools large-language-models jvm cli self-hosted cross-platform content-extraction metadata-extraction file-type-detection markdown-output rag-pipelines document-parsing tika-server grpc process-isolation apache-project search natural-language-processing data-engineering docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="apache/tika")