Build Collabora Office

Windows

Requirements

For starters, the same requirements as for building LibreOffice, see https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/BuildingOnWindows as you will do that as part of building Collabora office for windows. Make sure to use Visual Studio 2022. Using other Visual Studio versions for building the online bits has not been tested.

In Visual Studio 2022, also install the .NET desktop development components.

Setup

Turn on WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and install a distro. We use the default, Ubuntu, others presumably work, too. In an administrator Command Prompt:

	wsl --install Ubuntu

In that Ubuntu, install various things that will be needed later. Most of this is needed just to run the configure script in online. That configure script checks for tons of things that are completely irrelevant for Collabora office, but oh well. Patches welcome.

This is not necessarily a comprehensive list, you might notice more missing things as you go along.

sudo apt install libtool python3-lxml python3-polib g++ pkg-config
sudo apt install libpng-dev libzstd-dev libcppunit-dev libpam-dev

The following things are more essential, for bulding the JavaScript stuff. This is the main reason we are using WSL.

sudo apt install nodejs npm

Build LibreOffice

Clone the LibreOffice core repository and check out the coda-25.04 branch.

autogen.input:

--with-distro=CODAWindows
--with-visual-studio=2022
--enable-debug
--enable-msvc-debug-runtime
--enable-headless
--disable-ccache
--disable-opencl
--disable-pch
--without-doxygen
--without-lang
--without-lxml

The --with-distro, --with-visual-studio, and --enable-headless options are essential. The other ones you can play with. Note that if you build the Collabora Office project in Visual Studio in the Debug configuration, you must use a LibreOffice build with either --enable-dbgutil or --enable-msvc-debug-runtime.

The LibreOffice build should proceed fairly normally. Note that you will not end up with a runnable normal desktop LibreOffice. Attempting to run instdir/program/soffice.exe will just produce the message “no suitable windowing system found, exiting”.

You can attempt to run make check but that will probably run into some false positives.

The above is for a debug build, for a release build, a known to work autogen.input is:

--with-distro=CODAWindows
--with-visual-studio=2022
--enable-headless
--enable-mergelibs
--enable-symbols
--disable-ccache
--disable-opencl
--disable-pch
--without-doxygen
--without-galleries
--without-lang
--without-lxml

(The use of --disable-gallaries in the latter is not essential, could be used in the debug one, too.)

Building also LibreOffice using WSL

Apparently it is possible nowadays to build LibreOffice core for Windows using WSL, not Cygwin. Especialy when/if somebody would want or need to work on CODA on ARM64 Windows, it is good to manage without Cygwin, as Cygwin is available only for x64 Windows.

The coda-25.04 branch was successfully built under WSL following the instructions on TDF Wiki.

Build direct dependencies of Collabora Office for Windows

Version numbers below are current at the time of writing this. Newer versions will probably work, too. Except that online might not compile against Poco 1.14, so use the newest 1.13.*. For zlib and libpng we use the unpacked sources in the LibreOffice core build directory, and the static libraries already built there.

zstd

Download and unpack the zstd-1.5.7 tarball. Open the Visual Studio solution zstd-1.5.7/build/VS2010/zstd.sln. Let Visual Studio retarget the projects. It is enough to build just the libzstd project of the solution.

The static libraries that you are interested end up as zstd-1.5.7/build/VS2010/bin/x64_Debug/libzstd_static.lib and zstd-1.5.7/build/VS2010/bin/x64_Release/libzstd_static.lib .

Poco

Download and unpack the poco-poco-1.14.2-release.zip archive.

Then build it. Only a subset of it is needed. In a Ubuntu shell window, run:

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File buildwin.ps1 -action build -config both -linkmode static\_md -platform x64 -components Foundation,Util,JSON,Net,XML

Then move all the headers into one place:

mkdir -p include/Poco
cp -a Foundation/include/Poco/* include/Poco
cp -a Util/include/Poco/* include/Poco
cp -a JSON/include/Poco/* include/Poco
cp -a Net/include/Poco/* include/Poco
cp -a XML/include/Poco/* include/Poco

Build Collabora Office itself

Clone the git@gitlab.collabora.com:productivity/libreoffice/online.git repo, the coda-25.04 branch.

In an Ubuntu shell, run

./autogen.sh

then run the configure script. Like this to use release build of zstd and LibreOffice core.

(You will automatically get the Debug libraries of Poco when building a Debug configuration of the Collabora Office, and the Release libraries in a Release configuration. There is some slightly questionable #pragmas in <Poco/Foundation.h> to take care of that.)

./configure --enable-windowsapp --with-app-name=CODA --with-lo-builddir=/mnt/c/cygwin64/home/tml/lo/core-gitlab-coda25-coda-release --with-lo-path='C:\cygwin64\home\tml\lo\core-gitlab-coda25-coda-release\instdir' --with-poco-includes=/mnt/c/Users/tml/poco-poco-1.14.2-release/include --with-poco-libs=/mnt/c/Users/tml/poco-poco-1.14.2-release/lib64 --with-zstd-includes=/mnt/c/Users/tml/zstd-1.5.7/lib --with-zstd-libs=/mnt/c/Users/tml/zstd-1.5.7/build/VS2010/bin/x64_Release --with-libpng-includes=/mnt/c/cygwin64/home/tml/lo/core-gitlab-coda25-coda-release/workdir/UnpackedTarball/libpng --with-libpng-libs=/mnt/c/cygwin64/home/tml/lo/core-gitlab-coda25-coda-release/workdir/LinkTarget/StaticLibrary --with-zlib-includes=/mnt/c/cygwin64/home/tml/lo/core-gitlab-coda25-coda-release/workdir/UnpackedTarball/zlib --with-info-url=https://example.com/coda/info.html

Obviously, adapt as necessary to match your username and where you built LibreOffice, zstd, and Poco. Also change the --with-info-url as appropriate. That is the web page that will be shown when clicking the leftmost button in the toolbar.

Now you can build the JavaScript bits:

	cd browser && make

And then finally, open the windows/coda/CODA.sln solution in Visual Studio and build it.

To build Collabora Office from the command line, run this in x64 native Tools Command Prompt window. To do it from a script you probably want to check what the PATH in such a command prompt window is, and make sure to use the relevant PATH entries in a .cmd file.

msbuild /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x64 windows\coda\CODA.sln

To first clean the build, run:

msbuild /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x64 /t:Clean windows\coda\CODA.sln

You could also run that from a WSL shell, as long as you make sure PATH has what is needed, and you quote the msbuild command-line parameters as needed.