Deployment

Collabora server URL

There is a required registry record you need to configure: collective.collabora.collabora_server_url. This should be a publicly accessible URL that accesses your Collabora server.

By default, collective.collabora.collabora_server_url is configured to http://host.docker.internal/collabora. This requires a reverse proxy to be set up, see below.

Important

You will need to configure this value to match your deployment URL.

Important

Any configuration of this record on the Plone side, needs to match the corresponding service_root record of the Collabora server in coolwsd.xml. See below.

Avoiding CORS

Ideally, you will want to run the Collabora server on the same hostname and port as your Plone site. This avoids any CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) problems. Specifically, to be able to toggle fullscreen mode from the Plone side, requires such a setup where Collabora runs in the same URL space as Plone.

To realize this setup, you need to:

1. Proxy to Collabora

You need to configure your http server to proxy to Collabora. In the ./docker/nginx directory in this package you will find an example configuration that realizes this on the /collabora URL namespace.

2. Configure Collabora

Configure the Collabora coolwsd.xml config file, to set the record service_root to the value of the proxied URL path (i.e. /collabora). In the ./docker directory in this package you will find an coolwsd.xml example configuration that realizes this configuration.

3. Configure Plone

Configure the registry record collective.collabora.collabora_server_url to https://your.plone.server/collabora.

Hint

This needs to be a fully qualified URL. Configuring this record to only the path /collabora is invalid and will show an error in the UI and server logs.

See:

• https://sdk.collaboraonline.com/docs/installation/Proxy_settings.html

• https://sdk.collaboraonline.com/docs/installation/Configuration.html#network-settings

Collabora UI defaults

You can configure the Collabora UI defaults on a per-site basis, by configuring the registry record collective.collabora.ui_defaults.

Collective.collabora ships with a default ui configuration that is compact and uncluttered:

UIMode=compact;TextSidebar=false;TextRuler=false;PresentationStatusbar=false;SpreadsheetSidebar=false;

Once users change their UI preferences, this is persisted in browser local storage.

See:

• https://sdk.collaboraonline.com/docs/theming.html

Other Collabora configuration changes

To change the Collabora Online configuration, extract /etc/coolwsd/coolwsd.xml from the docker container. Make changes, then use e.g. a bind mound to map your changed configuration back into the docker container. See the provided example in ./docker (which only changes service_root).

Session security

The Collabora Online security architecture isolates all user document sessions from each other.

The only place where Collabora Online interacts with user data is what it gets from @@collabora-wopi (including the document name). The personal data flow within Collabora can be further anonymized, see anonymize_user_data in the Collabora coolwsd.xml configuration file.

The collective.collabora @@collabora-edit view passes a authentication token to the Collabora Online server. The Collabora Online server uses that authentication token, to retrieve information from Plone via the collective.collabora @@collabora-wopi view.

Collabora Online interacts with Plone exclusively though the @@collabora-wopi view, logged in as the user who opened the @@collabora-edit view. Both those Plone views are protected with the zope2.View permission through normal ZCML configuration. Additionally, performing a document save on @@collabora-wopi is protected with the ModifyPortalContent permission in python.

Protection against potential session hijacking can be configured by enabling WOPI Proof in your production deployment of Collabora Online. I’m not sure that makes sense in Plone though, since we already perform both authentication checks (twice: JWT + protect tokens) and full RBAC authorization checks.

Deployment security configuration

You will typically deploy a Collabora Online server behind a reverse proxy, and otherwise firewall it from the open internet.

Note

Whatever your network topology, Collabora Online needs to be able to connect to Plone on the public URL of your Plone site (or use the special direct URL, see below).

For a production deployment, you need to take the following security configurations into account:

• Proxy settings

• SSL configuration

• Content Security Policy

• Other security settings

Multihost configuration

If you want to use the same Collabora server to integrate with multiple sites, you will need to configure host allow/deny policies.

Direct Collabora-to-Plone connection

Collabora performs direct calls to Plone, on the @@collabora-wopi view on File objects. By default, this uses the same portal url where users access your Plone site in their browser. In a full production setup, this means Collabora emits a request that travels outward from wherever the Collabora server sits in your network, typically to the Nginx or Apache server that performs your SSL termination; to then traverse your full frontend stack via Varnish and HAProxy, to end up at a Plone instance.

In case that traversal outward-and-back-in-again gives problems, you can optionally configure Collabora to hit a different URL to access Plone directly, by setting the registry record collective.collabora.plone_server_url to point to a URL that routes to Plone in a way that bypasses your frontend stack.

Caution

Don’t configure this, unless you know you need to.