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General Information

Abstract​

The collaboration service connects opencloud with document servers such as Collabora, ONLYOFFICE or Microsoft using the WOPI protocol.

Since this service requires an external document server, it won't start by default when using opencloud server. You must start it manually with the opencloud collaboration server command.

Because the collaboration service needs to be started manually, the following prerequisite applies: On collaboration service startup, particular environment variables are required to be populated. If environment variables have a default like the MICRO_REGISTRY_ADDRESS, the default will be used, if not set otherwise. Use for all others the instance values as defined. If these environment variables are not provided or misconfigured, the collaboration service will not start up.

Required environment variables:

  • OC_URL
  • OC_JWT_SECRET
  • OC_REVA_GATEWAY
  • MICRO_REGISTRY_ADDRESS

Table of Contents​

Requirements​

The collaboration service requires the target document server (ONLYOFFICE, Collabora, etc.) to be up and running. Additionally, some OpenCloud services are also required to be running in order to register the GRPC service for the open in app action in the webUI. The following internal and external services need to be available:

  • External document server.
  • The gateway service.
  • The app-registry service.

If any of the named services above have not been started or are not reachable, the collaboration service won't start. For the binary or the docker release of OpenCloud, check with the opencloud list command if they have been started. If not, you must start them manually upfront before starting the collaboration service.

WOPI Configuration​

There are a few variables that you need to set:

  • COLLABORATION_APP_NAME:
    The name of the app which is shown to the user. You can chose freely but you are limited to a single word without special characters or whitespaces. We recommend to use pascalCase like 'CollaboraOnline'.

  • COLLABORATION_APP_PRODUCT:
    The product name of the connected WebOffice app, which can be one of the following:
    Collabora, OnlyOffice, Microsoft365 or MicrosoftOfficeOnline. This is used to internally control the behavior according to the different features of the used products.

  • COLLABORATION_APP_ADDR:
    The URL of the collaborative editing app (onlyoffice, collabora, etc).
    For example: https://office.example.com.

  • COLLABORATION_APP_INSECURE:
    In case you are using a self signed certificate for the WOPI app you can tell the collaboration service to allow an insecure connection.

  • COLLABORATION_WOPI_SRC:
    The external address of the collaboration service. The target app (onlyoffice, collabora, etc) will use this address to read and write files from OpenCloud.
    For example: https://wopi.example.com.

  • COLLABORATION_WOPI_SHORTTOKENS:
    Needs to be set if the office application like Microsoft Office Online complains about the URL is too long (which contains the access token) and refuses to work. If enabled, a store must be configured.

The application can be customized further by changing the COLLABORATION_APP_* options to better describe the application.

Storing​

The collaboration service persists information via the configured store in COLLABORATION_STORE. Possible stores are:

  • memory: Basic in-memory store. Will not survive a restart. This is not recommended for this service.
  • redis-sentinel: Stores data in a configured Redis Sentinel cluster.
  • nats-js-kv: Stores data using key-value-store feature of nats jetstream. This is the default value.
  • noop: Stores nothing. Useful for testing. Not recommended in production environments.

Other store types may work but are not supported currently.

Note: The service can only be scaled if not using memory store and the stores are configured identically over all instances!

Note that if you have used one of the deprecated stores, you should reconfigure to one of the supported ones as the deprecated stores will be removed in a later version.

Store specific notes:

  • When using redis-sentinel, the Redis master to use is configured via e.g. OC_CACHE_STORE_NODES in the form of <sentinel-host>:<sentinel-port>/<redis-master> like 10.10.0.200:26379/mymaster.
  • When using nats-js-kv it is recommended to set OC_CACHE_STORE_NODES to the same value as OC_EVENTS_ENDPOINT. That way the cache uses the same nats instance as the event bus.
  • When using the nats-js-kv store, it is possible to set OC_CACHE_DISABLE_PERSISTENCE to instruct nats to not persist cache data on disc.