Description:

unoserverfork 1.3.1

Using LibreOffice as a server for converting documents.

Overview
Using LibreOffice to convert documents is easy, you can use a command like this to
convert a file to PDF, for example:
$ libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf ~/Documents/MyDocument.odf
However, that will load LibreOffice into memory, convert a file and then exit LibreOffice,
which means that the next time you convert a document LibreOffice needs to be loaded into
memory again.
To avoid that, LibreOffice has a listener mode, where it can listen for commands via a port,
and load and convert documents without exiting and reloading the software. This lowers the
CPU load when converting many documents with somewhere between 50% and 75%, meaning you can
convert somewhere between two and four times as many documents in the same time using a listener.
Unoserver contains two commands to help you do this, unoserver which starts a listener on the
specified IP interface and port, and unoconverter which will connect to a listener and ask it
to convert a document.


Installation
NB! Windows and Mac support is as of yet untested.
Unoserver needs to be installed by and run with the same Python installation that LibreOffice uses.
On Unix this usually means you can just install it with:
$ sudo pip install unoserver
If you have multiple versions of LibreOffice installed, you need to install it for each one.
Usually each LibreOffice install will have it’s own python executable and you need to run
pip with that executable:
$ sudo /full/path/to/python -m pip install unoserver
To find all Python installations that have the relevant LibreOffice libraries installed,
you can run a script called find_uno.py:
wget -O find_uno.py https://gist.githubusercontent.com/regebro/036da022dc7d5241a0ee97efdf1458eb/raw/find_uno.py
python3 find_uno.py
This should give an output similar to this:
Trying python found at /usr/bin/python3... Success!
Trying python found at /opt/libreoffice7.1/program/python... Success!
Found 2 Pythons with Libreoffice libraries:
/usr/bin/python3
/opt/libreoffice7.1/program/python
The /usr/bin/python3 binary will be the system Python used for versions of
Libreoffice installed by the system package manager. The Pythons installed
under /opt/ will be Python versions that come with official LibreOffice
distributions.
To install on such distributions, do the following:
$ wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
$ sudo /path/to/python get-pip.py
$ sudo /path/to/python -m pip install unoserver
You can also install it in a virtualenv, if you are using the system Python
for that virtualenv, and specify the --system-site-packages parameter:
$ virtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python3 --system-site-packages virtenv
$ virtenv/bin/pip install unoserver
Windows and Mac installs aren’t officially supported yet, but on Windows the
paths to the LibreOffice Python executable are usually in locations such as
C:\Program Files (x86)\LibreOffice\python.exe. On Mac it can be for
example /Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/python.


Usage
Installing unoserver installs two scripts, unoserver and unoconverter.
Both can also be run as modules with python3 -m unoserver.server and
python3 -m unoserver.converter with the same arguments as the main scripts.

Unoserver
unoserver [-h] [--interface INTERFACE] [--port PORT] [--daemon] [--executable EXECUTABLE]

–interface: The interface used by the server, defaults to “localhost”
–port: The port used by the server, defaults to “2002”
–daemon: Deamonize the server
–executable: The path to the LibreOffice executable



Unoconvert
unoconvert [-h] [--convert-to CONVERT_TO] [--interface INTERFACE] [--port PORT] infile outfile

infile: The path to the file to be converted (use - for stdin)
outfile: The path to the converted file (use - for stdout)
–convert-to: The file type/extension of the output file (ex pdf). Required when using stdout
–interface: The interface used by the server, defaults to “localhost”
–port: The port used by the server, defaults to “2002”




Development and Testing

Clone the repo from https://github.com/unoconv/unoserver.
Setup a virtualenv:
$ virtualenv --system-site-packages ve
$ ve/bin/pip install -e .[devenv]

Run tests:
$ ve/bin/pytest tests

Run flake8 linting:

$ ve/bin/flake8 src tests





Comparison with unoconv
Unoserver started as a rewrite, and hopefully a replacement to unoconv, a module with support
for using LibreOffice as a listener to convert documents.

Differences for the user

Easier install for system versions of LibreOffice. On Linux, the apckaged versions of LibreOffice
typically uses the system Python, making it easy to install unoserver with a simple
sudo pip install unoserver command.
Separate commands for server and client. The client no longer tries to start a listener and then
close it after conversion if it can’t find a listener. Instead the new unoconverter client
requires the unoserver to be started. This makes it less practical for one-off converts,
but as mentioned that can easily be done with LibreOffice itself.
The unoserver listener does not prevent you from using LibreOffice as a normal user, while the
unoconv listener would block you from starting LibreOffice to open a document normally.
You should be able to on a multi-core machine run several unoservers with different ports.
There is however no support for any form of load balancing in unoserver, you would have to
implement that yourself in your usage of unoconverter.
Only LibreOffice is officially supported. Other variations are untested.



Differences for the maintainer

It’s a complete and clean rewrite, supporting only Python 3, with easier to understand and
therefore easier to maintain code, hopefully meaning more people can contribute.
It doesn’t rely on internal mappings of file types and export filters, but asks LibreOffice
for this information, which will increase compatibility with different LibreOffice versions,
and also lowers maintenance.




Contributors

Lennart Regebro, regebro@gmail.com
Stephan Richter, srichter@shoobx.com



1.3 (unreleased)

Nothing changed yet.



1.2 (2022-03-17)

Move logging configuration from import time to the main() functions.
Improved the handling of KeyboardInterrupt
Added the deprecated but still necessary com.sun.star.text.WebDocument
for HTML docs.



1.1 (2021-10-14)

Fixed a bug: If you specified an unknown file extension while piping the
result to stdout, you would get a type error instead of the correct error.
Added an extra check that libreoffice is quite dead when exiting,
I experienced a few cases where soffice.bin was using 100% load in the
background after unoserver exited. I hope this takes care of that.
Added if __name__ == "main": blocks so you can run the modules
as scripts, and also with python3 -m unoserver.server and
python3 -m unoserver.converter.



1.0.1 (2021-09-20)

Fixed a bug that meant unoserver did not behave well with Supervisord’s restart command.



1.0 (2021-08-10)

A few small spelling and grammar changes.



1.0b3 (2021-07-01)

Make sure interface and port options are honored.
Added an –executable option to the server to pick a specific libreoffice installation.
Changed the infile and outfile options to be positional.
Added support for using stdin and stdout.
Added a –convert-to argument to specify the resulting filetype.



1.0b2 (2021-06-24)

A bug prevented converting to or from files in the local directory.



1.0b1 (2021-06-24)

First beta release



0.0.1 (2021-06-16)

First alpha release

License

For personal and professional use. You cannot resell or redistribute these repositories in their original state.

Share

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter