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Papis

Papis is a command-line based for Linux bibliography manager that can be used for LaTeX using the BibTeX format.

Setup

Papis can be installed on most distributions by acquiring the papis package. Alternatively it can be downloaded from the GitHub page.

Configuration

To use Papis a config file needs to be created. The path of the global config file is ~/.config/papis/config. A minimal config can look like the following. Make sure to change the path of the papers directory.

[papers]
dir = ~/cloud/bibliography/papis

[settings]
default-library = papers

Usage

The following section describes various ways of usage of Papis.

Adding, Removing, Editing and Browsing Entries

An entry can be added by running a command similar to the following. The values for the different keys needs to be changed, added or omitted accordingly.

papis add ~/Documents/interesting.pdf \
    --folder-name interesting-paper-2021 \
    --set author 'John Smith' \
    --set title 'The interesting life of bees' \
    --set year 1985 \
    --set tags 'biology interesting bees'

Papis can also add sources directly via their DOI code.

papis add --from doi 10.10763/1.3237134

For the most well known journals are also recognized by Papis

papis add https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.03134

To remove an entry the following command can be run. Afterwards the entry that should be removed can be easily selected via the terminal user interface.

papis rm

Entries can be edited by using the following command.

papis edit

Entries can be browsed and viewed either in the terminal or via a local website. For the first run the following command.

papis browse

For the latter the following command can be run to start the server. The command-line output will show the address to reach the service.

papis serve

Create a BibTeX file

A BibTeX file containing all the entries of all the libraries can be created by running the following command. For this the command will create a file called lib.bib.

papis export --all --format bibtex --out lib.bib

Clearing the Cache

The cache of Papis can be cleared by running the following command.

papis --cc

Import Entries from a BibTeX File

This section will discuss the way to add the contents of a BibTeX file to the database. First the BibTeX file (in this case called mylib.bib) will be used to create a new database inside the folder tmp-db.

papis bibtex read mylib.bib import -a -o tmp-db

Afterwards the contents of the temporary database should be checked to be correctly imported.

papis -l tmp-db edit

Afterwards the contents of the temporary library should be moved to the actualy directory where papis stores its entries. The path for that can be found in the config file.

mv tmp-db/* /path/to/your/library/folder/

Finally the cache needs to be cleared for Papis to display the new entries correctly.

papis --cc