
Collabora Online Development Edition 4.0
Last update CODE 4.0: February 14, 2019
Get your own online Office Suite up and running at home with CODE!
Partners and clients get access to the partner portal. How does it look like and what do you get?

With links to tickets, preferences,…
See what Collabora is doing and at what upcoming events we’ll be present.
Add and manage your customers. You can add customer companies, and users for those customer companies. You can also report issues on
behalf of your customers, if you sell L3 support packages to them.
Visible to Collabora Online partners and customers. All relevant documents that you need to set up Collabora Online. Partner can find extra documents here, to help them market and sell Collabora Online.
Visible to Collabora Office resellers and customers. All relevant Collabora Office documents and the complete list of downloads.
Q&A
Where can I find out more about the technical architecture?
Clearly the code provides the canonical version of everything. However – here is some basic overview. The code splits into four pieces:
LibreOfficeKit
This is the API that allows the re-use of the bulk of the existing LibreOffice code. It exposes a simple abstract API to allow loading, saving, and rendering documents to image tiles, and also exposes an event based editing core. This piece lives in the main core.git module of LibreOffice.
Web Services daemon
This manages incoming session traffic, services cached document tiles, and spawns LibreOfficeKit client instances, setting up heavily locked down chroot jails for them. The code for this piece lives in loolwsd/ inside online.git.
JavaScript / NodeJS
This code is built on leaflet and provides the front-end, toolbars, and rendering of the document contents as it runs in the web client, it lives in the loleaflet directory in online.git.
FSS integration
Clearly on its own CODE is not terribly useful – so make sure you integrate it with your preferred FSS cf. above. The FSS implements a protocol such as WOPI to serve your document data, and integrate with its existing authentication mechanism.
So is this a new Office Suite written in Javascript?
In a word – no. This is LibreOffice brought to your browser in a new and interesting way. There are many good reasons not to duplicate, re-write and re-debug eight million lines of C++ into many millions of lines of JavaScript. Indeed – we have the opposite approach, of trying to minimise the amount of custom Javascript, and to share as much code as humanly possible with the PC and Mobile versions. There are also serious questions about how quickly it would be possible to JIT and execute such a large volume of Javascript – even if it were created, the problems of maintaining two diverging code-bases and synchronizing them is a well known nightmare, and finally – ongoing development is already hard in type-safe C++ with many extra compiler, safety checks; moving to type unsafe Javascript would make things un-maintainable. Instead by re-using the existing LibreOffice code we get huge benefits in terms of rendering and layout fidelity with existing ODF and proprietary file formats. So what you see on your Tablet, Browser and PC (Linux, Windows, Mac) should be identical – absent unusual and non-embedded fonts.
Known issues
There are a number of known issues that are hard for us to fix in CODE. These include external copy & paste – while we can provide rich eg. RTF content for selections from the server to the browser, existing browser APIS are extraordinarily unpleasant (to the point of un-usability) for copy/pasting rich content – as such, we do plain text copy and rich text paste.
Why didn’t you fix my bug yet for free?
Please feel free to join our efforts in making this the best Online Office Suite. We’re working hard to make CODE better, but more help is always welcome. Learn more in “Participate in the project”.
Is this all Free Software / Open Source?
Yes, of course. That was easy wasn’t it: Open First.
Where is the roadmap?
The development edition, aimed at home users, contains the latest and greatest developments and things are moving fast, but there is no published roadmap. If you want features delivered to your schedule then you’re looking for the commercial edition of Collabora Online.
Can I re-use your screenshots & content for my blog / article?
Yes naturally, please use this page’s content under some CC0 license / Public Domain as long as you respect our trademark, we love to get the message out.
Who did the work?
CODE is built on top of a huge volume of work from both LibreOffice (credits) and is built on top of Rich Documents plugin (credits), however the Online functionality was created primarily by Collabora (as announced in 2015) – read more about the story of that here. And thanks to Lukas Reschke for help with the docker image.
What are the latest updates?
The Packages, VM and Docker Image are regularly updated. Keep an eye out on our blog or twitter feed for news of changes.
Latest updates
- January 26, 2016 – Shared Editing, Transitions and animations presentations and other improvements.
- February 25, 2016 – Spreadsheet improvements, Usability and other improvements.
- April 25, 2016 – Admin Control Panel, Spreadsheets improvements and more.
- June 2, 2016 – Improved shared editing, header menus, context menus, inserting tables, inserting comments, Impress layouts… and much more!.
- June 23, 2016 – Possibility to run loolwsd behind a proxy, Better localization, buxfixes,….
- July 4, 2016 – ‘Help’ in the menu, Translations, first revision history sidebar.
- July 19, 2016 – New docker image, Collabora Online 5.1, Status bar features.
- September 15, 2016 – Resizeable rows and columns by mouse in Calc and SSL termination support for reverse proxies.
- October 13, 2016 – UI improvements: see who is viewing the document, new menu items and bugfixes.
- October 27, 2016 – Several improvements and CODE in Pydio.
- November 2, 2016 – CODE 2.0 released
- November 11, 2016 – Inclusion of Noto font family, improved Writer format menu, page size and orientation, WOPI updates and bugfixes.
- January 5, 2017 – Insert Special Characters, Initial support for IME (allowing to type in, for example, Chinese), API updates and many stability and bug fixes.
- January 25, 2017 – Responsive design, updated translations, UI and stability fixes
- February 10, 2017 – Pivot Table refresh, Fixed cell alignment commands, updated translations and improved performance
- March 10, 2017 – Minimized UI for readonly documents, reconnect silently, updated translations and stability fixes
- May 4, 2017 – Collabora Online 2.1 and CODE 2.1 released
- May 23, 2017 – Collabora Online 2.1.1 and CODE 2.1.1 released
- June 21, 2017 – Collabora Online 2.1.2 and CODE 2.1.2 released
- August 22, 2017 – Collabora Online 2.1.3 and CODE 2.1.3 released
- October 9, 2017 – Collabora Online 2.1.4 and CODE 2.1.4 released
- November 15, 2017 – Collabora Online 2.1.5 and CODE 2.1.5 released
- December 21, 2017 – Collabora Online Development Edition 3.0 released
- March 2, 2018 – Collabora Online and CODE 3.1 released
- April 19, 2018 – Collabora Online and CODE 3.2 released
- June 29, 2018 – Collabora Online and CODE 3.3 released
- July 6, 2018 – Collabora Online and CODE 3.3.1 released
- October 10, 2018 – Collabora Online and CODE 3.4 released
- December 18, 2018 – CODE 4.0 RC1 released
- December 21, 2018 – CODE 4.0 RC2 released
- New capability: hasMobileSupport true/false
is true when the Online has a good support for the mobile devices and responsive design. See also: hosting/capabilities documentation - Vereign toolbar: adapt to new API, and small UI fixes
- Package dependency problem on Debian 9 fixed
- New capability: hasMobileSupport true/false
- February 14, 2019 – Collabora Online 4.0 and CODE 4.0 released
Changes and improvements
If you have any suggestions for changes or have ideas for improvements, please contact us at hello@collaboraoffice.com.