Nextcloud is a popular free and open source alternative cloud service application. By hosting it on ones own server, it gives the user the opportunity to save and share files in a safe, easily available place without having to deal with large corporations who are actively out for our data. Unfortunately, for collaborative document editing, it only offers simple text files with minimal formatting possibilities. To edit documents, spreadsheets or presentations together with your family or coworkers, you will need a third party tool, ONLYOFFICE.
ONLYOFFICE by Ascensio System SIA offers a powerful office suite that comprises online editors for text documents, spreadsheets and presentations highly compatible with Microsoft Office and OpenDocument file formats. ONLYOFFICE provides users with multiple editing tools and collaborative features ensuring greater team workflow, and seamless work with complex formatting and objects within your web solution.
As in our tutorial on installing Nextcloud, we are going to be using the package available from Canonical's Snap store, and set up a reverse proxy, so you don't need to rent a separate server to run the document server. In this document, we assume, that Nextcloud is already installed and set up using an Nginx reverse proxy.
In this tutorial, we take a look at the use case, when we have one computer running with a single public IP address, which has multiple domain name (DNS) entries assigned, using a reverse proxy. As the ONLYOFFICE document server is available through a Snap package, it is suggested that Nextcloud is similarly installed from the Snap store.
Important note: I show the terminal commands in the black boxes following the $ character. Do NOT type that character, only what follows. Lines that don't start with $, are either files that should be created, or, if appearing after a command, the expected output that you should see returned on your terminal. This tutorial does not include all the expected outputs. If you get an error message, check your spelling and try again. If you are not sure what the problem is, consult the manual of the commands used. When you see italicized words in a black box like this: $ command parameter, that means that you should change the italicized part to a value relevant to your case.
