Integrating Apache Tika with Spring Boot for Document Parsing

Apache Tika is an open‑source library that can detect and extract content from over a thousand file formats. This guide shows how to integrate Tika into a Spring Boot application for document parsing.

Dependency

<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>

Configuration file (tika-config.xml)

<?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>

Configuration class (MyTikaConfig)

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);
    }
}

After the bean is configured, inject Tika into your services and use its detect , parse or translate methods to process documents.