AirSane

A SANE WebScan frontend that supports Apple's AirScan protocol. Scanners are detected automatically, and published through mDNS. Though images may be acquired and transferred in JPEG, PNG, and PDF/raster format through a simple web interface, its intended purpose is to be used with AirScan/eSCL clients such as Apple's Image Capture.

Images are encoded on-the-fly during acquisition, keeping memory/storage demands low. Thus, AirSane will run fine on a Raspberry Pi or similar device.

AirSane has been developed by reverse-engineering the communication protocol implemented in Apple's AirScanScanner client (macos 10.12.6, /System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/AirScanScanner.app).

Authentication and secure communication are not supported.

If you are looking for a powerful SANE web frontend, AirSane may not be for you. You may be interested in phpSANE instead.

Usage

Web interface

Open http://machine-name:8090/ in a web browser, and follow a scanner link from the main page.

macos

When opening Apple Image Capture or similar applications, scanners exported by AirSane should be immediately available. In 'Printers and Scanners', exported scanners will be listed with a type of 'Bonjour Scanner'.

Build

sudo apt install libsane-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev
sudo apt install libavahi-client-dev libusb-1.*-dev
sudo apt install git cmake g++
git clone https://github.com/SimulPiscator/AirSane.git
mkdir AirSane-build && cd AirSane-build
cmake ../AirSane
make

Install

The provided systemd service file assumes that user and group 'saned' exist and have permission to access scanners. Installing the sane-utils package is a convenient way to set up a user 'saned' with proper permissions:

sudo apt install sane-utils

To install AirSane:

sudo apt install avahi-daemon
sudo make install
sudo systemctl enable airsaned
sudo systemctl start airsaned
sudo systemctl status airsaned

Disable saned if you are not using it:

sudo systemctl disable saned

Disable unused scanner backends to speed up device search:

sudo nano /etc/sane.d/dll.conf

The server's listening port, and other configuration details, may be changed by editing '/etc/default/airsane'. For options, and their meanings, run

airsaned --help

By default, the server listens on all local addresses, and port 8090. To verify http access, open http://localhost:8090/ in a web browser. From there, follow a link to a scanner page, and click the 'update preview' button for a preview scan.

Troubleshoot

Compiling fails because of #include <libpng/png.h> not being found. On some distributions (e.g., Arch Linux), libpng may come in multiple flavors, with each having its own /usr/include subdirectory. Creating a symlink will then fix the build:

  ln -s /usr/include/libpng16/ /usr/include/libpng/

If you are able to open the server's web page locally, but not from a remote machine, you may have to allow access to port 8090 in your iptables configuration.
Enabling the 'test' backend in /etc/sane.d/dll.conf may be helpful to separate software from hardware issues.
To troubleshoot permission issues, compare debug output when running airsaned as user saned vs running as root:

  sudo systemctl stop airsaned
  sudo su - saned -s /bin/sh -c 'airsaned --debug=true --access-log=-'
  sudo airsaned --debug=true --access-log=-