CODE

Collabora Online Development Edition 4.2.0

Last update CODE 4.2.0-4: February 7, 2020

Get your own online Office Suite up and running at home with CODE!

The development edition is aimed at home users and contains many of the latest and greatest developments. We want as many people as possible to try it out and get back control of their own online documents. We’d also love to get people involved in our efforts to make Online even better. So download Collabora Online Development Edition, enjoy using it at home.
And … why not participate in the project too!

 

Getting set up the Collabora Online Development Edition

Get it at the Univention App Center

The easiest way to install CODE for a quick tryout is to download it as a virtual appliance from the Univention App Center.This appliance contains the Collabora Online Development Edition, and the additional software you need to get you up and running in minutes. You can choose between two types of integration, CODE + Nextcloud or CODE + ownCloud. Each appliance is available in four formats: KVM, VirtualBox, VMware Workstation and VMware ESXi.

Grab CODE docker image from Docker Hub

The collabora/code Docker image can be installed to any x86-64 host (e.g. on Linux and Windows 10), and it is fully configurable. For more information about setup and configuration for deployment, please read the CODE Docker page. If you want to try it out quickly, you can set up CODE docker image with file sharing integration in less than 5 minutes in a very basic way, following these instructions: quick tryout with ownCloud or quick tryout with Nextcloud.

Packages for Linux x86-64 platform
As an alternative to Docker image, Collabora provide native Linux packages for selected Linux distributions. If you have Debian 8, Debian 9, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, CentOS 7 or openSUSE Leap, please read the CODE Linux packages page.
Unstable snaphots
The latest Online developments can be easily tested with our online snapshots. See the Easily test the latest features in.. page.


Setting up a reverse proxy and SSL

It is highly recommended to set up a reverse proxy in front of CODE, either you run CODE from Docker, or you use native packages. It is easy, and this way CODE can be reached on standard HTTP or HTTPS ports. We provide sample configuration files for Apache2 and Nginx. If you want SSL, we recommend certificates from Let’s Encrypt.

Now you can give https://collabora.example.com as the WOPI URL in your preferred File Sync and Share solution. See below for specific examples.
For more detailed and pretty instructions on integrating with various partner solutions please see (in alphabetical order):

What next ?

That’s it – once you’ve integrated CODE with your preferred File Sync and Share (FSS), or started up your VM you should be setup to share and collaborate on your own documents, with friends, from the comfort of your own home.

So now you’re all happy and secure, why not participate in the project?

Participate in the project

Checking out the source code to build it yourself is easy; http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/online has the latest commits, and build instructions. After compiling ‘online’ just do a $make run and follow the link to tweak things live. The API is visible here: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online-editor-api-reference/ and LibreOffice Online API.To send patches, and collaborate with other developers working on the code please do join in at #libreoffice-dev on irc.freenode.org, or join the Mailing List. If you want to help update the documentation please do help out in the Wiki, to file bugs please head to Bugzilla and as you file a bug – please do take the time to confirm at least one other un-confirmed bug if there are any. Help fixing bugs, and patches that arrive via gerrit are most easy for us to merge.

What is CODE, LibreOffice Online, Collabora Online & snapshot?

LibreOffice Online is great for home use as well as enjoying the latest translations and developments. CODE is a somewhat more conservative version – but still a development edition – of Online, and is built around the Collabora Office core.

  • CODE is perfect for home users that want to start to run their own online Office Suite, but will warn you when it starts to look like it is being used in an enterprise – ie. more than twenty documents or ten users.
  • The LibreOffice Online Docker Image is a very regularly updated snapshot of the latest master build of both online and LibreOffice that has passed both the LibreOffice and online automated testing.
  • CODE builds on the other hand, are released on average once a month and announced on this website.
  • If you are looking for a scalable, commercially supported version with Long Term Support, signed security updates and a SLA, your best bet is to check out our Collabora Online page.

Collabora Developers continuously work on new and improved features in Collabora Online. If you are interested in these latest features under development, check our unstable snapshots !

For more details on enterprise support from various partner solutions please see: Nextcloud, ownCloud, Kolab, VNC Lagoon, Arawa, FileCloud, AG-I Solutions, SecuredStore, Alinto, Studio Storti, Rono IT, equipe, New Access, United Hoster, Urberri, Webo.hosting, Artistanbul, PC HELP, Retention Range, Workman.net.au, DAASI International GmbHCheck out the page Understanding the differences between LibreOffice Online, CODE and Collabora Online for more details about the differences or download the white paper “8 Million Reasons to Choose Collabora Online”

Download the White Paper

8-million-reasons-white-paper-logo

“8 Million Reasons to Choose Collabora Online”




Partners and clients get access to the partner portal. How does it look like and what do you get?

1) Main menu
With links to tickets, preferences,…
2) Latest news and upcoming events
See what Collabora is doing and at what upcoming events we’ll be present.
3) Customers block
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.
4.1) Collabora Online block
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.
4.2) Collabora Office block
Visible to Collabora Office resellers and customers. All relevant Collabora Office documents and the complete list of downloads.

Become a partner and add Collabora Online to your product portfolio

Contact sales if you want to use Collabora Online in your business or organization

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
New major version: 4.2.0

    • December 16, 2019 – CODE 4.2.0 released
      • fresh user interface, clean look, feature rich side bar, and much more
    • January 11, 2020 – CODE 4.2.0-3 released with bugfixes
    • February 7, 2020 – CODE 4.2.0-4 released with bugfixes

Releases of version 4.0:

Changes and improvements

If you have any suggestions for changes or have ideas for improvements, please contact us at hello@collaboraoffice.com.

Timeline