At Tech and Me we love to automate stuff to make tech easier, and this time it has come to the Collabora docker for Nextcloud, including the app. When we first looked at it we scratched our heads and thought, how can we do this in the best and most secure way? There are a few things to think about; the docker image, the proxying and checking that the user have setup the correct domains, also certain ports needs to be open. The list goes on and on.

 Collabora is now stable in the VM

In Nextcloud 11.0.1 we released the BETA version of the Collabora script and since we didn’t get any feedback we thought everything was good. But then it happened. A user posted a question on the Nextcloud forum about it and we started to investigate. It turned out that it didn’t work at all as one of the first checks was failing and aborted the script. Well yeah, that’s a kind of nasty bug. But good in the same time, becuase the users that tried to install Collabora with the BETA version of the script, actually didn’t install anything at all so the VM didn’t get bloated becuase we added that check prior installing anything.

So yesterday Daniel spent a whole day improving the script, and the result is: Collabora is no longer BETA! We consider it stable now, and as it’s downloaded via the startup-script in 11.0.1 already, it means that everyone that uses the current VM will get the stable Collabora script!

Preparations

There are some preparations though if you want it to work instantly when the VM is mounted for the first time and startup-script is run – you have to prepare your server with 2 domains, prior to running the script. That means one domain for the Collabora docker (office.example.com) and one for your Nextcloud (cloud.example.com).This is easily fixed by pointing your domain A-record to the server that will host Nextcloud / Collabora. You also need to use SSL on the cloud domain prior to running the script.

If you don’t have SSL on your cloud domain then just run the startup-script as usual and install SSL via Let’s Encrypt in the end of the startup-script. When the VM is rebooted after the startup-script finished successfully, then run the Collabora script by typing:

$~: sudo bash /var/scripts/collabora.sh

If you don’t find the Collabora script in the scripts folder of the VM, then get the latest version from Github:

$~: sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nextcloud/vm/master/apps/collabora.sh -P /var/scripts
Please report issues

Without your feedback it’s hard for us to know the errors and fix them. So please let us know if you run into any issues and report them to our Github repo.

That’s all for now, stay tuned for more!