Cheat Sheet (PDF)

This content was generated with the assistance of AI and should be verified against the official documentation before being relied on in production.

The reference material consulted while preparing these pages is listed in the section bibliography.

A single A4 page to print or keep beside the editor, with the baseline date 2026-10-13 and Apache Tika 4.1.0 (3.3.2 for the 3.x line). No 4.2 release exists yet. It covers:

  • the release lines with their Java requirement (3.x: 11, 4.x: 17), the artifact map with tika-bom, and the "which way to run Tika?" table (facade and AutoDetectParser in process, PipesForkParser, tika-app, tika-server, tika-grpc and Tika Pipes);

  • the facade one-liners (detect, parseToString), the AutoDetectParser skeleton with TikaInputStream, a handler, Metadata and ParseContext, and a PipesForkParser skeleton;

  • the detection layers and the MediaType hierarchy, the 4.x charset detection chain, and the content handler types of BasicContentHandlerFactory (Markdown by default, the 100,000-character BodyContentHandler limit);

  • the key metadata properties and the 3.x to 4.x tk: renames, RecursiveParserWrapper and /rmeta with the embedded limits, and LanguageDetector with CharSoup or OpenNLP;

  • the tika-config.json top-level sections, TikaLoader and ${env:NAME} secrets, the PDF parser and OCR settings (text-recognizers, Tesseract, the -full image), and VLM parsers and inference in one line each;

  • custom Parser and Detector registration with @TikaComponent or a service file;

  • the tika-app flags (-z and -Z for attachments), the tika-server endpoints, 429 versus 503, allowPipes and allowPerRequestConfig, the required server block and a Docker run line, and the tika-grpc image on port 9090;

  • the Tika Pipes roles, parse modes, emit strategies and plugins, and the limits and timeouts table with defaults;

  • the security rules (isolate parsing, trusted network only, no public exposure, external commands);

  • a Spring Boot upload to tika-server with RestClient, and why the Spring AI and LangChain4j Tika readers need Tika 3.x;

  • search (Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch) and RAG integration in one line each; and

  • the changes from 1.x to 2.x, 3.x and 4.x.

Download the cheat sheet (PDF)

References

  • Section bibliography for the official documentation, standards and books behind every line of the sheet.