Integrating Apache Tika into a Spring Boot Application for Document Parsing

Apache Tika is an open‑source document parsing library that can extract content from over a thousand file formats, and it can be used via a GUI, a server, or embedded in applications.

This article demonstrates how to integrate Tika into a Spring Boot project, starting with the required Maven dependencies.

First, add the Tika BOM and the core and parser packages in the dependencyManagement section and as regular dependencies:

<dependencyManagement>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.apache.tika</groupId>
      <artifactId>tika-bom</artifactId>
      <version>2.8.0</version>
      <type>pom</type>
      <scope>import</scope>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.tika</groupId>
  <artifactId>tika-core</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.tika</groupId>
  <artifactId>tika-parsers-standard-package</artifactId>
</dependency>

Next, place a tika-config.xml file under src/main/resources with custom encoding detectors configuration:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<properties>
    <encodingDetectors>
        <encodingDetector class="org.apache.tika.parser.html.HtmlEncodingDetector">
            <params>
                <param name="markLimit" type="int">64000</param>
            </params>
        </encodingDetector>
        <encodingDetector class="org.apache.tika.parser.txt.UniversalEncodingDetector">
            <params>
                <param name="markLimit" type="int">64001</param>
            </params>
        </encodingDetector>
        <encodingDetector class="org.apache.tika.parser.txt.Icu4jEncodingDetector">
            <params>
                <param name="markLimit" type="int">64002</param>
            </params>
        </encodingDetector>
    </encodingDetectors>
</properties>

Then create a Spring configuration class MyTikaConfig that loads the XML, builds a TikaConfig, obtains a Detector and an AutoDetectParser, and registers a Tika bean for injection:

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import org.apache.tika.Tika;
import org.apache.tika.config.TikaConfig;
import org.apache.tika.detect.Detector;
import org.apache.tika.exception.TikaException;
import org.apache.tika.parser.AutoDetectParser;
import org.apache.tika.parser.Parser;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.core.io.Resource;
import org.springframework.core.io.ResourceLoader;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;

/**
 * Tika configuration class
 */
@Configuration
public class MyTikaConfig {

    @Autowired
    private ResourceLoader resourceLoader;

    @Bean
    public Tika tika() throws TikaException, IOException, SAXException {
        Resource resource = resourceLoader.getResource("classpath:tika-config.xml");
        InputStream inputStream = resource.getInputStream();
        TikaConfig config = new TikaConfig(inputStream);
        Detector detector = config.getDetector();
        Parser autoDetectParser = new AutoDetectParser(config);
        return new Tika(detector, autoDetectParser);
    }
}

With the Tika bean injected, the application can call Tika’s detect, translate, and parse methods to process documents.

An example usage screenshot is shown below:

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