by Internuncio

GitHub Readme.md

Heroku Buildpack Tesseract

This package provide a custom Heroku buildpack providing the Tesseract OCR binary and all the required libraries to Heroku apps. Training data for English and Finnish language is provided.


The first step consists in allowing your Heroku app to use multiple buildpacks. We use the excellent heroku-buildpack-multi as follows:

  1. add a configuration variable as

    heroku config:set

    or (equivalently) change the default buildpack as

    heroku buildpacks:set https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi
  2. create a file called .buildpacks inside your app as


    where LANG is the language used by your app (e.g., ruby, python, or nodejs). A complete list of Heroku buildpacks can be found here.

  3. you can use the tesseract binary in your Heroku app!
  4. deploy :)


A minimal functioning Heroku app using this buildpack can be found here. The app is coded in Python and provides a REST method that accept an image and return the Tesseract OCR output as a JSON object. The REST functionality is implemented through the Flask web microframework.


This fork solves the issue of the missing libraries libtiff4 and libjpeg62.


MIT License.

Original work Copyright (c) 2013 Marco Azimonti
Modified work Copyright (c) 2015 Matteo Maggioni