gosseract OCR

Golang OCR package, by using Tesseract C++ library.

OCR Server

If you need an OCR server or want to see a working example of this package, there is a ready-made server application, which is very easy to deploy!

👉 https://github.com/otiai10/ocrserver

Example

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"github.com/otiai10/gosseract/v2"
)

func main() {
	client := gosseract.NewClient()
	defer client.Close()
	client.SetImage("path/to/image.png")
	text, _ := client.Text()
	fmt.Println(text)
	// Hello, World!
}

Installation

macOS

brew install tesseract
go get -t github.com/otiai10/gosseract/v2

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

sudo apt-get install -y libtesseract-dev libleptonica-dev tesseract-ocr-eng
go get -t github.com/otiai10/gosseract/v2

Please check this Dockerfile to get started. Alternatively, you can deploy the pre-existing Docker image by invoking docker run -it --rm otiai10/gosseract.

Windows

Windows support requires vcpkg and MinGW-w64:

# Install Tesseract via vcpkg
vcpkg install tesseract:x64-windows

# Create MinGW import libraries from vcpkg DLLs
cd C:/vcpkg/installed/x64-windows/bin
gendef tesseract55.dll leptonica-1.87.0.dll
dlltool -d tesseract55.def -l libtesseract.a -D tesseract55.dll
dlltool -d leptonica-1.87.0.def -l libleptonica.a -D leptonica-1.87.0.dll
mv *.a ../lib/

# Download language data
mkdir C:/tessdata
curl -L -o C:/tessdata/eng.traineddata https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata/raw/main/eng.traineddata

Set environment variables before building:

export CGO_ENABLED=1
export CC=C:/mingw64/bin/gcc.exe
export CGO_CFLAGS="-IC:/vcpkg/installed/x64-windows/include"
export CGO_LDFLAGS="-LC:/vcpkg/installed/x64-windows/lib"
export TESSDATA_PREFIX="C:/tessdata"
export PATH="/c/mingw64/bin:/c/vcpkg/installed/x64-windows/bin:$PATH"

For detailed troubleshooting, see knowledge/windows-support.md.

Test

In case you have tesseract-ocr installed on your local environment, you can run the tests with:

% go test .

If you DON'T want to install tesseract-ocr on your local environment, run ./test/runtime which utilises Docker and Vagrant to test the source code on some runtimes.

% ./test/runtime --engine docker
% ./test/runtime --engine vagrant

Check ./test/runtimes for more information about runtime tests.

Note: Clear Linux support was removed in January 2026 as Intel discontinued the distribution in July 2025.

Note: Arch Linux support was removed in January 2026 as the official image does not provide ARM64 architecture support.

Issues

• https://github.com/otiai10/gosseract/issues