How to integrate ONLYOFFICE with Nextcloud on Ubuntu

ONLYOFFICE is an open-source office suite that features online editors for text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The editors are highly compatible with MS Office formats (DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX) and equipped with numerous collaborative tools - real-time co-editing, commenting, reviewing, and built-in chat (to discover all available features, refer to this tutorial).

As you know, the ONLYOFFICE editors are currently integrated in more than 20 popular platforms and hundreds of enterprise services to be used within their interface. In this article, we showed you one of the integration cases: the integration of ONLYOFFICE online suite into Alfresco content management platform.

In this article, we will tell about the ONLYOFFICE integration with Nextcloud, an open source, self-hosted file-sharing and communication platform.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

This guide will describe how to connect ONLYOFFICE and Nextcloud instances to each other via the integration app that enables users to edit and co-edit office documents from Nextcloud using ONLYOFFICE Document Server.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

• ONLYOFFICE Document Server
• Nextcloud (you can get the latest version from the official website)
• Nextcloud ONLYOFFICE integration app

You will need an instance of ONLYOFFICE that is resolvable and connectable both from Nextcloud and any end clients. ONLYOFFICE Document Server must also be able to POST to Nextcloud directly.

ONLYOFFICE Document Server can be installed on the same machine as your Nextcloud or on the different one. In case you select the first variant, you will need to set up a custom port for Document Server as by default both ONLYOFFICE Document Server and Nextcloud work on port 80.

Check the software requirements and available installation options here.

To integrate ONLYOFFICE document editors, we’ll need an integration app (we also call it a connector) that will work as a bridge connecting ONLYOFFICE Document Server and the Nextcloud instance.

1. Go to the Nextcloud server apps / directory (or some other directory used to connect applications):

   cd apps/
   

2. The easiest way is to get a connector from Nextcloud app store. The app is available in the Office & Text tab.

You can also download the latest signed version from the application release page on GitHub or clone the application source code and compile it yourself:

git clone https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/onlyoffice-nextcloud.git onlyoffice

3. Change the owner to update the application right from Nextcloud web interface:

   chown -R www-data:www-data onlyoffice
   

Then access Nextcloud, open the page with Not enabled apps and click Enable for the ONLYOFFICE application.

After installation, you will see a new option in the settings menu.

• There, you’ll need to specify the address of the machine with ONLYOFFICE installed:

  https://documentserver/
  

The Nextcloud server address must also be accessible from ONLYOFFICE Document Server for correct work.

• You are also able to restrict the access to ONLYOFFICE Document Server. To do that, enter the Secret key in the appropriate fields. In the ONLYOFFICE Document Server config file specify the same secret key and enable the validation.
• Enable or disable the Open file in the same tab setting.

After saving the above setting, the Open in ONLYOFFICE action will be added to the file context menu. You can specify this action as default and it will be used when the file name is clicked for the selected file types.

To create documents, spreadsheets and presentation files within Nextcloud by clicking the plus (+) button. The editor interface will be loaded in a new tab:

Now you are able to:

• edit and co-edit in real time your DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, CSV, TXT files. Other popular file formats can be opened for editing via their inner conversion into OOXML formats.
• view PDF files;
• co-edit docs shared between multiple different Nextcloud instances (Federated Cloud Sharing);
• work with the right sidebar panel to track activities, share documents to other users;
• adjust the editor interface and change the presence or absence of the additional buttons such as Chat menu, Feedback & Support menu and Help menu buttons;
• select a file for comparison;
• share documents in a Talk chat with drag & drop:

• protect documents with watermarks:

You can also connect your ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors (for more information about the ONLYOFFICE desktop client and available installation options, read this article) to Nextcloud to work and collaborate on documents.