Running LibreOffice Online on my server

English
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#1

Greetings,

First time append.

I’ve used LibreOffice for awhile on my desktop for personal doc use and love it.

I would like to integrate Libre Office Online to one of the websites that I own/maintain so my clients can directly, in a browser, create/update/delete documents that I maintain for them on the server (without the hassle of upload/download).

I started looking at OnlyOffice to accomplish this as well, but have decided to go with Libre Office Online

My hosted server runs Centos 7 and I have full access to everything.

I have a few questions (mostly related to installing/running LibreOffice Online in docker) that I was hoping someone could help me clarify before starting down this path …

Since both LibreOffice Online and OnlyOffice offer a Docker install (and claim it’s the easiest way to get up and running)
it’s probably time I started learning Docker …

  1. I had planned to start here - How To Install and Use Docker on CentOS 7 | DigitalOcean to get Docker installed and then get a container for LibraOffice installed. … or can anyone suggest a better place to start ?

  2. This seems like a lot of overkill to be able to edit office docs on a server … I say that just because I don’t yet understand the resource/performance/maintenance hits involved with running things in Docker.

  3. Still not sure if I can access/open/save a document that’s on my server that are outside of the docker container (?)

To clarify … I would only want to use the docker container to supply the document editor functionality of my web app. My app would continue to run as a normal web app as it does today (not in docker).

I already have some “document management” functionality running as part of my app using Cute File Browser similar to this demo - Cute file browser
Was hoping I could “hook in” LibreOffice Online when clicking to open a file.

Any help/advice/suggestions in getting started with this adventure is most appreciated.

Thanks !!
Steve

#2

Collabora provides instructions for installing their CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition) which is a tweaked/polished Libreoffice Online. You can find them here: Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) - Collabora Office and Collabora Online

You have to install it in combination with NextCloud, and its Collabora Online extension (https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/richdocuments). NextCloud provides the user authentication, file storage and general UI.

I first installed NextCloud (you will find plenty of tutorials on the web for how to do that). Nextcloud is not a resource hog; you can run it on a Raspberry Pi if you want. Again, there are plenty of tutorials on the web to do so.

I installed it twice. Once by means of a docker image, and then a second time based on the packages for Ubuntu.
I did it the docker way first, just for simplicity: see Quick tryout with Nextcloud docker - Collabora Office and Collabora Online.
The disadvantage of the docker way is the amount of disk space the docker image needs. That is why I switched to the packages.

Collabora Online + NextCloud works very well. There is one think your users have to keep in mind: changes in a document are saved automatically. This means that when you edit a document and change your mind, just closing the document will not revert to the original version! Luckily, the integration with Nextcloud provides the possibility to revert a document to a previous version (but you have to do it explicitly).

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