How does Libreoffice start up?

[sistemi]

Hello everybody, I am trying to get some informations about Libreoffice startup in Alfresco Community 201707 (last stable release).

Today I noticed that document preview was not working anymore, so I searched for libreoffice/soffice process; I found that was in <defunct> state, so i killed it. To start it again, I run ./alfresco.sh start libreoffice as alfresco user, but that command gave no output; searching in that script I found that libreoffice start script name was wrong: in the script it is named $INSTALLDIR/libreoffice/scripts/ctl.sh, but on the filesystem its name is $INSTALLDIR/libreoffice/scripts/libreoffice_ctl.sh. Searching in this forum I found some references about this typo in various old posts, so I edited alfresco.sh script and run again ./alfresco.sh start libreoffice: libreoffice started (to be honest two processes started: a running one and a <defunct> one), but file preview kept on not working.

So I decided to restart completely alfresco with ./alfresco.sh stop and start, and after that three libreoffice processes were running: a <defunct> one, and two .soffice.bin running at the same time: one had more parameters than the other one. So I re-edited alfresco.sh restoring ctl.sh as libreoffice start script and restarted again Alfresco, and this time only one process was running (the one with more parameters) and the document preview worked again.

In conclusion... I suppose that Libreoffice is not started by alfresco.sh anymore, and this is achieved by specifing a wrong script name in the script?

How is Libreoffice started in the newer versions of Alfresco? Is there a way to start it manually without restarting all Alfresco services?

[cesarista · Accepted solution]

Hi:

As you noted Libreoffice manual script via alfresco.sh is broken (i saw this in several versions of Alfresco) when using the installer. You need either:

i) change ctl.sh to libreoffice_ctl.sh in alfresco.sh 

or

ii) create a symbolic link in libreoffice/scripts 

This should work and then you can start and stop libreoffice via alfresco.sh manually

On the other hand, this is not the way Alfresco starts transformation subsystem as you have ooo.exe property in alfresco-global.properties. In CE, you may need to restart Alfresco for restarting subsystem, if manual restarts did not work (once script is fixed).

Regards.

--C.

[paulthach]

I had a similar issue.  I found that libreoffice will start with or without the symlink to libreoffice_ctl.sh.  Even though alfresco.sh looks for crl.sh file (LIBREOFFICE_SCRIPT=$INSTALLDIR/libreoffice/scripts/ctl.sh)

Recently, it starting libreoffice as root, with a defunct child process.   Normally it run as non-root user.

/app/alfresco-5.2.3 # ps -ef | grep office
root 10863 1 0 14:21 pts/0 00:00:00 /opt/alfresco-5.2.3/libreoffice/program/.soffice.bin --nofirststartwizard --nologo --headless --accept=socket,host=localhost,port=8100\;urp\;StarOffice.ServiceManager
root 10866 10863 0 14:21 pts/0 00:00:00 [.soffice.bin] <defunct>