Collabora Online¶

Collabora Online offers real-time collaboration with office documents in your browser. As soon as you open a file from Seafile, Collabora opens in a new browser tab and allows real time collaboration. As soon as the last user exits the document by closing his browser window, the document is saved back to the Seafile storage.

This article is about the how to install the CODE version of collabora online.

You have to decide: Collabora OR OnlyOffice

Collabora and OnlyOffice are both office editors. You have to decide which one you would like to use. You can not use both in parallel.

Use a separate host, if you expect many users

Collabora Online (CODE) can be installed on the same host as Seafile Professional Edition. If Collabora Online is used regularly and by many users, the host should be fitted with sufficient cores and RAM or you should install Collabora on a separate host.

This manual assumes that Seafile Professional Edition is installed and is running.

Installation¶

Activate collabora¶

To install OnlyOffice, include collabora.yml in the COMPOSE_FILE variable within your .env file. This instructs Docker to download the required images for OnlyOffice.

Simply copy and paste () the following code into your command line:

sed -i "s/COMPOSE_FILE='\(.*\)'/COMPOSE_FILE='\1,collabora.yml'/" /opt/seafile-compose/.env

Set required environment variables¶

Now execute the following command to add the required configuration to your .env file. You don't have to replace ${SEAFILE_SERVER_HOSTNAME}. It will replaced automatically.

cd /opt/seafile-compose
source .env
echo -e "\n# collabora online" >> .env
echo "SEAHUB__OFFICE_SERVER_TYPE='CollaboraOffice'" >> .env
echo "SEAHUB__ENABLE_OFFICE_WEB_APP=True" >> .env
echo "SEAHUB__OFFICE_WEB_APP_BASE_URL='https://${SEAFILE_SERVER_HOSTNAME}:6232/hosting/discovery'" >> .env
echo "SEAHUB__OFFICE_WEB_APP_FILE_EXTENSION='odp,ods,odt,odg,xls,xlsb,xlsm,xlsx,ppsx,ppt,pptm,pptx,doc,docm,docx'" >> .env
echo "SEAHUB__ENABLE_OFFICE_WEB_APP_EDIT=true" >> .env
echo "SEAHUB__OFFICE_WEB_APP_EDIT_FILE_EXTENSION='odp,ods,odt,odg,xls,xlsb,xlsm,xlsx,ppsx,ppt,pptm,pptx,doc,docm,docx'" >> .env

Download collabora and restart¶

One more step is necessary to download the Collabora container and restart the Seafile container.

cd /opt/seafile-compose
docker compose down
docker compose up -d

Check if installation is complete¶

Wait for some seconds and then open https://<your-seafile-url>:6232 and you should see simple an OK. This confirms that Collabora Online is up and running. Office documents that you double click in your base should be opened with Collabora Online in a new browser tab.

Advanced: Custom settings¶

Admin interface¶

Collabora Online provides an admin interface, which is disabled by default. Add the following parameters to your .env file to activate it and adapt it to your needs.

COLLABORA_ADMIN=username
COLLABORA_PW=password
COLLABORA_ENABLE_ADMIN_CONSOLE=true

After restarting the Collabora container you can access the admin interface at https://<your-seafile-url>:6232/browser/dist/admin/admin.html.

Activate File Logging¶

To activate File logging of Collabora Online you have to add the following parameter to your .env file:

COLLABORA_ENABLE_FILE_LOGGING=true

After a restart of the container the logs are written to /opt/cool/logs/coolwsd.log. To access this log file at the host system you have to create a folder and change the permission to 777.

mkdir /opt/collabora
chmod 777 /opt/collabora

Now make a copy of the collabora.yml and uncomment the volumes definition in your custom-collabora.yml.