---
title: "TikaDocumentConverter"
id: tikadocumentconverter
slug: "/tikadocumentconverter"
description: "An integration for converting files of different types (PDF, DOCX, HTML, and more) to documents."
---

# TikaDocumentConverter

An integration for converting files of different types (PDF, DOCX, HTML, and more) to documents.

|                                        |                                                                                                 |
| :------------------------------------- | :---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Most common position in a pipeline** | Before [PreProcessors](../preprocessors.mdx) , or right at the beginning of an indexing pipeline |
| **Mandatory run variables**            | "sources": File paths                                                                           |
| **Output variables**                   | "documents": A list of documents                                                                |
| **API reference**                      | [Converters](/reference/converters-api)                                                                |
| **GitHub link**                        | https://github.com/deepset-ai/haystack/blob/main/haystack/components/converters/tika.py       |

## Overview

The `TikaDocumentConverter` component converts files of different types (pdf, docx, html, and others) into documents. You can use it in an indexing pipeline to index the contents of files into a Document Store. It takes a list of file paths or [`ByteStream`](../../concepts/data-classes.mdx#bytestream) objects as input and outputs the converted result as a list of documents. Optionally, you can attach metadata to the documents through the `meta` input parameter.

This integration uses [Apache Tika](https://tika.apache.org/) to parse the files and requires a running Tika server.

The easiest way to run Tika is by using Docker: `docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:9998:9998 apache/tika:latest`.
For more options on running Tika on Docker, see the [Tika documentation](https://github.com/apache/tika-docker/blob/main/README.md#usage).

When you initialize the `TikaDocumentConverter` component, you can specify a custom URL of the Tika server you are using through the parameter `tika_url`. The default URL is `"http://localhost:9998/tika"`.

## Usage

You need to install `tika` package to use the `TikaDocumentConverter` component:

```shell
pip install tika
```

### On its own

```python
from haystack.components.converters import TikaDocumentConverter
from pathlib import Path

converter = TikaDocumentConverter()

converter.run(sources=[Path("my_file.pdf")])
```

### In a pipeline

```python
from haystack import Pipeline
from haystack.document_stores.in_memory import InMemoryDocumentStore
from haystack.components.converters import TikaDocumentConverter
from haystack.components.preprocessors import DocumentCleaner
from haystack.components.preprocessors import DocumentSplitter
from haystack.components.writers import DocumentWriter

document_store = InMemoryDocumentStore()

pipeline = Pipeline()
pipeline.add_component("converter", TikaDocumentConverter())
pipeline.add_component("cleaner", DocumentCleaner())
pipeline.add_component(
    "splitter",
    DocumentSplitter(split_by="sentence", split_length=5),
)
pipeline.add_component("writer", DocumentWriter(document_store=document_store))
pipeline.connect("converter", "cleaner")
pipeline.connect("cleaner", "splitter")
pipeline.connect("splitter", "writer")

pipeline.run({"converter": {"sources": file_paths}})
```
