Can I create a web based database with LibreOffice Base?

I’m a beginning database student. Can I create a web-based database using LibreOffice Base? I’ll have about 10 users and need to input customer data on a pad.

I’ve created a database in libre office and am now trying to put it online so that others can contribute. I wonder if you figured out how to do it and if you can suggest some tutorials to help me.
I’ve uploaded my tables to Firebase thinking that I can use this as a free way to host the database. Now I’m trying to figure out how to connect the tables in Firebase.
I wonder if there is a better way to host my tables online for free for use with libre office base.

Not the best idea to append to an existing question AND doing this in teo places. I’ll give you a short answer at the other place, but strongly recommend to open your own question.

LibreOffice can create 2 types of databases newly from scratch: HSQL and Firebird. These databases are encapsuled in the Base document. Every time you access the embedded database for the first time after loading the document, it will be “installed” to a temporary directory and connected as a fille based database. “File based database” means that there is no service listening at any port. The database driver opens the database file(s) with full admin rights to the single office user. Any subsequent user accessing the same database document will get a read-only connection.

It is fairly easy to extract an embedded database and use the extracted files instead of the embedded files. This gives you several advantages over the embedded database but still no multi–user network access.

In order to make the extracted database accessible via network for multi-user access, you have to set up a database server and make your database files accessible to that server program.

You may also set up one of the popular database servers (MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL,…), create your database with one of the popular development tools and finally connect a Base document to your database server in order to use LibreOffice as an alternative frontend to your database, feed serial letters, printable reports and calculation models with database data.

1 Like

Here are the basic steps you take:

1) A web based database runs either on your internet hosting server or on a server that your internet hosting server can talk to.

For example. You go to a hosting company and pay for a hosting account and in return you get cpanel interface. From cpanel you drill down to databases, and then select and setup a database server, either MySQL, PostgreSQL, or the like, with user(s) and password(s). (You might also have the ability to setup an internet facing database server in other ways too like thru your school’s account.)

2) Now this database server that you have setup can be connected to via either your web site (php code, or the like for example), or remotely from your notebook computer. In your notebook you can use a variety of tools to connect like phpMyAdmin, MS Access via ODBC, MyWorkbench, and LibreOffice via either the native SQL driver (extension) or an ODBC connector.

[Note, At the moment w/ LibreOffice 5.2.2.2 I can’t get the unixODBC to work without crashing LibreOffice, but the unixODBC is working otherwise. I’m still searching for an answer to this issue. But the native MySQL driver seems to connect to a MariaDB 10.1 data base ok, except that I’m getting an intermittent broken connection from time to time that I’m also still trying to chase down. I’m assuming all of these issues are solvable with a little more work on my part.]

ONCE you finally have the database set up, then you can use LibreOffice to “connect” to it and to manage it.

Have fun, as it’s a great adventure.

If this answers your question please click on the :heavy_check_mark: (upper left area of answer).

Do you have any experience with Firebase? Can this act as a server that your internet hosting server can talk to?

If you have to ask this, you are not the right person to attempt this approach. Instead: Start with your (intended) web-hoster. They usually offer one or more available databases. Most common are MariaDB/MySQL. You can connect to this databases with Base. Thera are lots of adfitional frontends available - check the answer by @EasyTrieve and if you need more guidance, ask your own question, instead of making this thread unreadable.

It depends what you mean by ‘web-based’. LibreOffice Base is really just a ‘front end’ to an underlying RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) database. The actual database ‘back-end’ may be on a local network (‘split’ from the Base file itself) for sharing purposes. But if you want to connect Base to an online (web-based) database, it may prove easier and more cost-effective to adopt a form-centric, web-database solution - see this post by DACM.

Another idea - you might be able to locate your Base file on a file-share service (like, say, Dropbox), but only ONE user may connect at one time (to prevent database corruption). A client-server configuration (such as used by MySQL) is really the only way to protect against data-corruption with multiple concurrent users. In any case, I recommend you adopt a ‘split’ database setup (as above) to protect against data-loss - see THIS TUTORIAL for more information.

Yes, I think this will suit my needs. Thanks.

@JuniorGray Please do not post as an answer unless it actually answers the question asked. Use add a comment instead.

This would probably be better as a comment where you asked the original question!