libreoffice-online/wsd

Collabora Online WebSocket server

Dependencies

Collabora Online WebSocket server has the following dependencies:

• libpng
• Poco library: https://pocoproject.org/
• libcap-dev (Debian/Ubuntu) / libcap-progs (SUSE/openSUSE) / libcap-devel (RedHat/CentOS)
• libpam-dev (Debian/Ubuntu) / pam-devel (RedHat/CentOS/SUSE/openSUSE)

If your Linux distro doesn't provide a Poco package (versions 1.7.5 and newer should work), you can build it yourself and install in a location of your choice.

On openSUSE Leap 15.1, you can use:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/libraries:/c_c++/openSUSE_Leap_15.1/devel:libraries:c_c++.repo
zypper in poco-devel libcap-progs python3-polib libcap-devel npm

Similar repos exist for other openSUSE and SLE releases.

Building

coolwsd uses autoconf/automake, so especially when building from .git (as opposed to from a distribution tarball) you need to run:

./autogen.sh

and then

./configure --enable-silent-rules --with-lokit-path=${MASTER}/include \
		--with-lo-path=${MASTER}/instdir --enable-debug
make

where ${MASTER} is the location of the LibreOffice source tree.

When building from a tarball less magic is needed.

Run 'make check' after each commit.

If you have self-built Poco, add the following to ./configure:

--with-poco-includes=<POCOINST>/include --with-poco-libs=<POCOINST>/lib

where means the Poco installation location.

If you have the Poco debugging libraries (eg. you have a self-built Poco), you can add --enable-debug to the configure options for additional debugging.

For Windows, a proper VS2013 project is needed.

There is still unconditional debugging output etc. This is a work in progress.

Running

You can just do:

make run

and follow the link that recommends (see browser/README for more info).

Again, ${MASTER} is location of the LibreOffice source tree with a built LibreOffice. This is work in progress, and consequently needs the latest LibreOffice master.

Running manually

If you want to do the 'make run' yourself, you need to set up a minimal chroot system, and directory for the jails:

SYSTEMPLATE=`pwd`/systemplate  # or tweak for your system
ROOTFORJAILS=`pwd`/jails       # or tweak for your system

rm -Rf ${SYSTEMPLATE} # clean
./coolwsd-systemplate-setup ${SYSTEMPLATE} ${MASTER}/instdir # build template
mkdir -p ${ROOTFORJAILS} # create location for transient jails.

To run coolwsd the way it is supposed to eventually be run "for real", you can now do:

./coolwsd --o:sys_template_path=${SYSTEMPLATE} --o:child_root_path=${ROOTFORJAILS}

The ${SYSTEMPLATE} is a directory tree set up using the coolwsd-systemplate-setup script here. (It should not exist before running the script.) It will contain the runtime environment needed by the LibreOffice dynamic libraries used through LibreOfficeKit. Improvements to that script are very likely needed on various distros.

The ${ROOTFORJAILS} directory above is a presumably initially empty directory under which coolwsd will create chroot jails for editing each specific document.

As coolwsd uses hardlinks to "copy" the contents of both ${SYSTEMPLATE} and the ${MASTER}/instdir directories into each chroot jail, ${SYSTEMPLATE} and ${MASTER}/instdir need to be on the same file system as ${ROOTFORJAILS}.

Leaflet files are served itself by coolwsd internal file server. You can specify the root of this fileserver using the --o:file_server_root_path flag in coolwsd commandline. By default, if you do not specify this flag, the parent directory of coolwsd/ is assumed to be the file_server_root_path. So, for development purposes, you can access the COOL files (using /browser/), but it is advised to explicitly set the file_server_root_path to prevent any unwanted files from reading, especially when cool is deployed for normal public usage on servers.

Please note that it is necessary that all the COOL files that are meant to be served is under a directory named 'browser'. Since, the COOL files, in the git repo, are itself in a directory named 'browser', this would work out of the box for development purposes.

If you run coolwsd on HTTPS, you have to set up your own private key and certificates (in PEM format only). The name and location of key, certificate and CA certificate chain is defined in ${sysconfdir}/coolwsd/coolwsd.xml. Dummy self-signed cert.pem, ca-chain.cert.pem and key.pem are already included, but it is better to replace those with your own files.

To generate the new self-signed certificate, you can do the following. Maybe there is a less verbose way, but this worked for me:

# create tha ca-chain.cert.pem

mkdir private

openssl genrsa -aes256 -out private/ca.key.pem 4096

# You will be asked many questions, put the IP in Common Name
openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -key private/ca.key.pem -sha256 -extensions v3_ca -out ca.cert.pem

openssl genrsa -aes256 -out private/intermediate.key.pem 4096

openssl req -sha256 -new -key private/intermediate.key.pem -out intermediate.csr.pem

mkdir -p demoCA/newcerts
touch demoCA/index.txt
echo 1000 > demoCA/serial
openssl ca -keyfile private/ca.key.pem -cert ca.cert.pem -extensions v3_ca -notext -md sha256 -in intermediate.csr.pem -out intermediate.cert.pem

cat intermediate.cert.pem ca.cert.pem > ca-chain.cert.pem

# create the key / cert

openssl genrsa -out key.pem 2048

openssl req -sha256 -new -key key.pem -out csr.pem

# change "unique_subject = yes" to "unique_subject = no" in demoCA/index.txt.attr
# otherwise you'll get the following error:
#   failed to update database
#   TXT_DB error number 2

openssl ca -keyfile private/ca.key.pem -cert ca.cert.pem -extensions usr_cert -notext -md sha256 -in csr.pem -out cert.pem

HTTPS is the default. HTTP-only mode can be enabled with --disable-ssl configure option.

If you plan to hack on coolwsd, you probably want to familiarize yourself with coolwsd's --o:num_prespawn_children switch, and the 'connect' test program.

For interactive testing, you can use the 'connect' program. It accepts "commands" from the protocol on standard input.

Test running with integration for developers

Unless you want to test SSL itself, it is easier to go for the non-SSL option.

Setup Nextcloud or ownCloud on localhost, and install the richdocuments app. Good tutorials exist how to install ownCloud or Nextcloud, we don't repeat them here. richdocuments is called Collabora Online in the respective app stores / marketplaces / whatever.

When you have a running Nextcloud or ownCloud instance at http://localhost/nextcloud or at http://localhost/owncloud go to Collabora Online settings, and set the WOPI URL to http://localhost:9980

Then in the build tree, edit the generated coolwsd.xml and set ssl setting to false. You can run make run, and test coolwsd with the ownCloud or Nextcloud integration.

Admin Panel

You can access the admin panel by directly accessing the admin.html file from browser directory. See browser/README for more details.

Websocket connections to admin console can be made at path: /adminws/ on the same url and port as coolwsd is running on. However, one needs a JWT token to authenticate to the admin console websocket. This is stored as a cookie with Path: /adminws/ when user successfully authenticates when trying to access /browser/dist/admin/admin*html files (HTTP Basic authentication). Token is expired after every half an hour, so websocket connection to admin console must be established within this period.

It should also be possible to do various sorts of tasks such as killing documents that are open for more than 10 hours etc. See protocol.txt for various commands. Only tricky thing here is getting the JWT token which can be obtained as described above.

Debugging

When debugging, you want to add --o:num_prespawn_children=1 to the coolwsd parameters to limit the amount of concurrently running processes.

When the crash happens too early, you also want to

export SLEEPFORDEBUGGER=<number of seconds>

or export PAUSEFORDEBUGGER=1

so that you have time to attach to the process.

Then run coolwsd, and attach your debugger to the process you are interested in. Note that as the coolforkit executable file has capabilities set, so when debugging that you need to run the debugger with super-user privilege.

Also, note that as the child processes run in a chroot environment, they see the LibreOffice shared libraries as being in a directory tree /lo , but your debugger does not. So in order to be able to effectively debug the LibreOffice code as used through LibreOfficeKit by a child coolwsd process, you need to symlink the "lo" subdirectory of a running child coolwsd process's chroot jail as /lo. Something like:

sudo ln -s ~/libreoffice/master/cool-child-roots/1046829984599121011/lo /lo

Use the ps command to find out exactly the path to use.

Set COOL_DEBUG=1 to trap SIGSEGV and SEGBUS and prompt for debugger.

if you choose PAUSEFORDEBUGGER send the signal SIGUSR1 to resume the process

In order to run and debug one unit test, run the commandline that is printed when the test fails. To run one single CppUnit test from a suite, additionally use:

CPPUNIT_TEST_NAME="HTTPWSTest::testCalcEditRendering" <printed commandline>

Protocol description

See protocol.txt for a description of the protocol to be used over the websocket.

Architecture

There are three processes: CoolWSD, CoolForKit, and CoolKit.

WSD is the top-level server and is intended to run as a service. It is responsible for spawning ForKit and listening on public port for client connections.

The ForKit is only responsible for forking Kit instances. There is only one ForKit per WSD instance and there is one Kit instance per document.

WSD listens on a public port and using internal pipes requests the ForKit to fire a child (Kit) instance to host documents. The ForKit then has to find an existing Kit that hosts that document, based on the public URI as unique key, and forward the request to this existing Kit, which then loads a new view to the document.

There is a singleton Admin class that gets notified of all the important changes and update the AdminModel object accordingly. AdminModel object has subscribers which corresponds to admin panel sessions. Subscriber can subscribe to specific commands to get live notifications about, and to update the UI accordingly.

Whether a document is loaded for the first time, or this is a new view on an existing one, the Kit connects via a socket to WSD on an internal port. WSD acts as a bridge between the client and Kit by tunnelling the traffic between the two sockets (that which is between the client and WSD and the one between WSD and Kit).

File System

WSD is given childroot argument on the command line. This is the root directory of jailed FS. This path can be anywhere, but here we'll designate it as:

/childroot

Before spawning a ForKit instance, WSD needs to generate a random Jail-ID to use as the jail directory name. This JailID is then passed to ForKit as argument jailid.

Note: for security reasons, this directory name is randomly generated and should not be given out to the client. Since there is only one ForKit per WSD instance, there is also one JailID between them.

The ForKit creates a chroot in this directory (the jail directory):

/childroot/jailid/

ForKit copies the LO instdir (essentially installs LO in the chroot), then copies the Kit binary into the jail directory upon startup. Once done, it chroot-s and drops caps.

ForKit then waits on a read pipe to which WSD writes when a new request from a client is received. ForKit is responsible for spawning (or forking) Kit instances. For our purposes, it doesn't matter whether Kit is spawned or forked.

Every document is hosted by a Kit instance. Each document is stored in a dedicated directory within the jail directory. The document root within the jail is /user/docs. The absolute path on the system (which isn't accessible to the Kit process as it's jailed) is:

/childroot/jailid/user/docs

Within this path, each document gets its own sub-directory based on another random Child-ID (which could be the Process ID of the Kit). This ChildId will be given out to clients to facilitate the insertion and downloading of documents. (Although strictly speaking the client can use the main document URI as key, this is the current design.)

/childroot/jailid/user/docs/childid

A request from a client to load a document will trigger the following chain of events.

• WSD public socket will receive the connection request followed by a "load" command.
• WSD creates MasterProcessSession (ToClient) to handle the client traffic.
• MasterProcessSession requests ForKit to find or spawn Kit for the given URI.
• ForKit sends Kit request to host URI via pipe.
• Kit connects to WSD on an internal port.
• WSD creates another MasterProcessSession (ToPrisoner) to service Kit.
• MasterProcessSession (ToClient) is linked to the ToPrisoner instance, copies the document into jail (first load only) and sends (via ToPrisoner) the load request to Kit.
• Kit loads the document and sets up callbacks with LOKit.
• MasterProcessSession (ToClient) and MasterProcessSession (ToPrisoner) tunnel the traffic between client and Kit both ways.

Coding style

There is not really any serious rationale why the code ended up being written in the style it is... but unless you plan to change some style detail completely and consistently all over, please keep to the style of the existing code when editing.

The style is roughly as follows, in rough order of importance:

• As in LO, no hard TABs in source files. Only spaces. Indentation step is four columns.

• As in LO, the braces { and } of the block of if, switch, and while statements go on separate lines.

• Following Poco conventions, non-static member variables are prefixed with an underscore. Static members have a CamelCase name.

• Do use C++11. I admit in some places (out of laziness or ignorance) I use Poco API even if there probably is an equivalent std:: API. (Like for threads.) Feel free to change those, if the std:: API is not much more verbose or ugly, and you are sure it is equivalent.

• Always prefer the C++ wrapped version of a C library API. I.e. include instead of <string.h>, use std::memcpy() instead of memcpy(), etc.

• Use std:: prefix for all std API, i.e. don't ever do "using std;". But it's OK to use "using Poco::Foo;" all over. Maybe that is not a good idea? But please no "using" in headers.

• Member functions use camelCaseWithInitialLowerCase. I don't like CamelCaseWithInitialUpperCase.

• [ No kind of Hungarian prefixes. ]

• return - is not a function; but a statement - it doesn't need extra ()

• Use 'auto' in the following cases only:

  • iterators

  • range-based for loops

  • the type is spelled out in the same line already (e.g. initializing from a cast or a function that has a single type parameter)

  In other cases it makes the code more readable to still spell out the type explicitly.

Security credential related changes

• Instead of the usual one, two reviews are needed.

• Instead of just choosing the 'approve' option on GitHub, please add your explicit sign-off to the commit message when you review.