# Quick Start

This guide gets you from zero to searching your first document in under five minutes.

## 1. Start Pagepiper

```bash
./manage.sh start
```

Open `http://localhost:8521` in your browser.

## 2. Add a document

You have two options:

**Upload directly** — click **Upload PDF / EPUB** in the library header and pick a file from your computer.

**Scan a directory** — set `PAGEPIPER_WATCH_DIR` in your `.env` to a folder of PDFs or EPUBs, then click **Scan for PDFs**. Pagepiper indexes every file it finds.

## 3. Wait for indexing

The document card shows progress while text is being extracted and embedded:

- **Extracting text...** (animated bar) — PDF/EPUB is being parsed into page chunks
- **Embedding N / M pages (X%)** (filling bar) — vectors are being written to the vector store (only when Ollama is configured)

Once the badge shows **READY**, the document is searchable.

## 4. Search

Click **Search** in the navigation. Type any phrase and see ranked page excerpts with scores. Results are instant using BM25 full-text search — no Ollama required.

## 5. Chat (optional, requires Ollama)

See the [Ollama Setup](ollama-setup.md) guide to enable hybrid vector search and LLM-powered chat. Once configured, the **Chat** tab lets you ask natural-language questions and get answers with page citations.