To use OnlyOffice with Nextcloud, your container needs to reachable via https, so you need to add a subdomain and SSL Certificate in your Nginx reverse proxy. Then just go to your Nextcloud installation and install the OnlyOffice Addon. There just enter the new domain to your OnlyOffice Docker Container and the JSON Web Token. Office files should now be editable in OnlyOffice.
If you want to use the external storage app to mount an NFS share in Nextcloud, there are two ways when using Docker. Mount the NFS share directly inside the Docker container. This would be easier when the container is already up and runing. Or mount the NFS share on the Host and pass the mountpoint as an argument when creating the Docker container: -v /mnt/nfs/:/mnt/nfs/
Both, Nextcloud and Collabora, are recommending the Docker installation for Collaboraoffice (here and here). But I wasn’t able to get the Collabora Docker Image running succesfully inside an Debian Buster LXC. There were appearing some errors and as far as I understand, it has something to do with running an LXC on ZFS. After spending about 3 hours I gave up and did a manual installation.
Installation
For a current installation guide, have look on their website here. Install https support for apt and add Collabora CODE repository. (CODE = Collabora Online Development Edition)
You have to edit three sections in the config: SSL handling, inserting your Nextcloud domain as WOPI client and add some credentials for webinterface. So open the config with:
nano /etc/loolwsd/loolwsd.xml
If you are using a reverse proxy (I have running a docker with nginx) which is managing all SSL certifactes, you don’t need local certifactes for your Collaboraoffice. So scroll down to the SSL settings, disable SSL and enable SSL termination.
<ssl desc="SSL settings">
<enable type="bool" desc="Controls whether SSL encryption is enable (do not disable for production deployment). If default is false, must first be compiled with SSL support to enable." default="true">false</enable>
<termination desc="Connection via proxy where loolwsd acts as working via https, but actually uses https." type="bool" default="true">true</termination>
2. Next add you Nextcloud domain in the WOPI storage section.
<storage desc="Backend storage">
<filesystem allow="false" />
<wopi desc="Allow/deny wopi storage. Mutually exclusive with webdav." allow="true">
<host desc="Regex pattern of hostname to allow or deny." allow="true">localhost</host>
<host desc="Regex pattern of hostname to allow or deny." allow="true">nextcloud\.domain\.org</host>
3. Add your credentials fot the webinterface.
<admin_console desc="Web admin console settings.">
<enable desc="Enable the admin console functionality" type="bool" default="true">true</enable>
<enable_pam desc="Enable admin user authentication with PAM" type="bool" default="false">false</enable_pam>
<username desc="The username of the admin console. Ignored if PAM is enabled.">user_name</username>
<password desc="The password of the admin console. Deprecated on most platforms. Instead, use PAM or loolconfig to set up a secure password.">super_secret_password</password>
Now restart loolwsd and check the status.
systemctl restart loolwsd.service
systemctl status loolwsd.service
Check if the https connection is working via browser https://ipaddress:9980 or curl:
Go to your reverse proxy, in my case it’s nginx proxy manager, and add another subdomain for collabora with an SSL certificate.
You also have to add a few custom locations. Look at the Collabora website for the some nginx configs. I used the second with “SSL terminates at the proxy”. I also added the given custom locations via the webui, e.g.:
You should now be able to reach Collabora through your new subdomain via https. https://collabora.your.domain.org/ And if you added /lool/adminws in your nginx config, you can also access the webui. https://collabora.your.domain.org/loleaflet/dist/admin/admin.html
Install & configure Collabora Online App in Nextcloud
The easiest part is to install the Collabora Online App. If done, go to Settings -> Collabora Online and set your Collabora Domain https://collabora.your.domain.org/ in here. Apply and edit your first excel in Nextcloud.
Add a Token in you local.json file. If your running ONLYOFFICE on linux you will find the file here:
/etc/onlyoffice/documentserver/local.json
Set inbox, outbox and browser to true and add you token in the secret part for inbox, outbox and session. I just generated a random string via Bitwarden.
As I installed OnlyOffice to edit Word and Excel files directly from my Nextcloud, I had to setup a reverse proxy because OnlyOffice needs to run on a separate Server/Container and has to be reachable via https. First I tried to setup Nginx manually (way to complicated to handle in my opinion), then I tried Traefik (if you’re running a docker einvironment, I’m sure that’s a good solution) and in the end, I stuck with Nginx Proxy Manager. If you already have docker installed, this is by far the easiest way and also provides an awesome WebUI, where you can manage all your proxy hosts and SSL certificates.
The installation is done in just three simple steps: Set the port fowarding (80 and 443) in your router to your server/container, grab all the files in the doc/example/ folder and run
docker-compose up -d
And it’s done. Now just enter the WebUI (ip:81) and setup all your routes.
