Exactly one year ago, I gave OnlyOffice in combination with Nextcloud a try. The pressure to have an Online Office Suite for the household kept rising and Collabora Online Office just didn’t cut it for me. I immediately liked OnlyOffice, as it was just as quick in the browser as a locally installed Libreoffice and compatibility with that other office suite used by the majority is great. However, while the software is open source, it has one limitation: Document access on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones is read-only. For full read/write capabilities on mobile devices, a subscription is required. At $149 for a year for 10 users, it is not the cheapest kid on the block, but it’s still open source and my files remain private on my own Nextcloud instance. I would have gone to the paid version sooner, as I like to support open source software development, but I wasn’t quite sure what it would take to change the server side. The OnlyOffice documentation is a bit opaque about this. So when I had a bit of time on my hands, I decided to find out. Turned out, it’s much easier than what I’d expected.
After paying for the one year ‘Docs Home Server‘ license I got a license key file and a link to instructions on where to put the license file. The description did not look quite straight forward, but the gist of it is that the license file has to be mapped into a directory of the Docker container when it starts up. To do this, I only had to modify 2 lines in my docker-compose.yml config file, which I described in previous posts:
services:
onlyoffice-documentserver:
container_name: onlyoffice-documentserve
image: onlyoffice/documentserver
image: onlyoffice/documentserver-ee
[...]
volumes:
- /var/www/onlyoffice/Data
- /var/log/onlyoffice
- /var/lib/onlyoffice/documentserver/App_Data/cache/files
- /var/www/onlyoffice/documentserver-example/public/files
- /usr/share/fonts
- ./license:/var/www/onlyoffice/Data
Instead of using the ‘onlyoffice/documentserver‘ Docker image, I changed to the Enterprise Edition (ee) of the image. And the second change was to put the license file into a directory I called ‘license‘ in the docker-compose directory and link it into the ‘/var/www/onlyoffice/Data‘ directory inside the image. This directory was previously mapped to the default Docker storage space, but I wanted to keep the license file in the project directory.
And there we go, after starting this setup, the Enterprise Edition of the document server image is downloaded and the license file is mapped. Everything looks as before on the desktop, but I can now edit documents in the web browser on tablets and smartphones. Very nice!