The Apache Tika project is pleased to announce the release of Apache Tika 4.0.0. The release contents have been pushed out to the main Apache release site and to the Maven Central sync.
Apache Tika is a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries. Apache Tika 4.0.0 is the first stable release of the 4.x line. It switches the default output to Markdown, moves parsing into crash-isolated forked processes (tika-server, tika-app's async/fork modes and tika-grpc all parse out-of-process via tika-pipes), and adds vision-language-model parsers (Claude, Gemini, OpenAI). Configuration is now JSON rather than XML (tika-app's --convert-config-xml-to-json offers a starting point for migrating a 3.x parsers config). tika-app, tika-server and tika-eval now ship as runnable zip distributions (with drop-in pf4j pipes plugins) in place of shaded jars, and the Docker "latest" tags now track 4.x. Tika 4.x requires Java 17 or later. Metadata keys have been renamed for consistency and provenance with an opt-in compatibility filter that restores the 3.x key names where direct mapping exists. The key-for-key rename tables are in the metadata migration guide (https://tika.apache.org/docs/4.0.x/migration-to-4x/metadata-changes-4x.html), and tika-core bundles the same mapping in a machine-readable form (metadata-migration-3x-4x.json). As a new major version, 4.0.0 includes breaking changes. Please see the migration guides (https://tika.apache.org/docs/4.0.x/migration-to-4x/) and the notable changes page (https://tika.apache.org/4.0.0/) before upgrading. The 3.3.x line remains supported and continues to receive bug fixes and dependency upgrades. Details can be found in the changes file: https://www.apache.org/dist/tika/4.0.0/CHANGES-4.0.0.txt and in our 4.x docs site: https://tika.apache.org/docs/4.0.x/ Apache Tika is available on the download page: https://tika.apache.org/download.html Apache Tika will be available shortly in binary form or for use with Maven from the Central Repository: https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/tika/ When downloading, please remember to verify the downloads using signatures found: https://www.apache.org/dist/tika/KEYS For more information on Apache Tika, visit the project home page: https://tika.apache.org/ Many, many thanks to fellow devs and our larger community! -- Tim Allison, on behalf of the Apache Tika community
