Unfortunately, there is no officially supported way to do this. The official dataserver package does not have an instruction: https://github.com/zotero/dataserver
I’m in the same boat. Plus, the iPad app was not great at the time, which is very important to me (I read and annotate papers a lot on my iPad, it is an ideal device for this). I dug a bit to see if it was likely to be resolved soon, and it did not seem like it. So I find another solution, which in retrospect was a good thing since that was 5 years ago and the situation has not changed since.
FWIW I ended up using Bookends, which can use iCloud for hosting and synchronisation across devices. I wasn’t thrilled initially because it’s a fairly obscure app, but both the Mac and the iPad apps are great. The developer is very friendly and reactive, and it’s been rock solid for years now.
Is this (https://github.com/iandol/bookends-tools) the Bookends you referring to ? I don't care about citations. All I need is a PDF organizer have categories / tags and can add notes / make annotations.
Yes, that’s the one. I had been using Papers ever since version 1 beforehand, but I had to look for an alternative after the clusterfuck that was version 3.
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/73721/zotero-self-hoste...
https://www.reddit.com/r/zotero/comments/d270kv/zotero_datas...
https://github.com/zotero/dataserver/issues/105
https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/48335/foss-...
https://groups.google.com/g/zotero-dev/c/9FdSz0kIG_4?pli=1
Unfortunately, there is no officially supported way to do this. The official dataserver package does not have an instruction: https://github.com/zotero/dataserver
There is an unofficial package from 5 years ago https://hub.docker.com/r/facciolo/zotero_dataserver-docker