RHEL5 init (init.d) script for OpenOffice.org (2.3+)

Thursday, October 9th, 2008 CentOS5, Fedora, Linux, Web Development

For a recent project I needed to perform document translations from DOC to PNG which requires an essential intermediate step to PDF. The transformations required us to go to from DOC to PDF which can easily be done very nicely using openoffice 2.3 in a headless configuration. The downside is you need a process running on a machine which you can connect to to make the transformation.

Here is the init.d script for starting up the soffice.bin (soffice) program in a headless mode:

#!/bin/bash
# chkconfig: 345 20 80
# description: init.d script for headless openoffice.org (2.3+ for RHEL5 32bit)
#
# processname: soffice
#
# source function library
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
 
RETVAL=0
SOFFICE_PATH='/usr/lib/openoffice.org/program'
SOFFICE_ARGS='-accept="socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp" -headless -nofirststartwizard'
SOFFICE_PIDFILE=/var/run/soffice.bin.pid
 
start_soffice() {
       echo -n $"Starting OpenOffice.org"
       $SOFFICE_PATH/soffice.bin $SOFFICE_ARGS >/dev/null 2>&1 &
       [ $? -eq 0 ] && echo_success || echo_failure
       pidof soffice.bin & $SOFFICE_PIDFILE
       echo
}
start() {
       start_soffice
}
stop() {
       echo -n $"Stopping OpenOffice"
       killproc soffice.bin
       echo
}
case "$1" in
       start)
               start
               ;;
       stop)
               stop
               ;;
       restart)
               stop
               start
               ;;
       *)
               echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
esac

NOTE: in 64bit the lib path has a ‘64′ in it so

SOFFICE_PATH='/usr/lib/openoffice.org/program'

becomes

SOFFICE_PATH='/usr/lib64/openoffice.org/program'

6 Comments so far »

Jorge Williams said

February 18 2009 @ 4:10 pm

Hi Chris,

I don’t think it’s a good idea to run soffice as root.

I’d suggest creating a user “soffice” and trying something like:

su – soffice -c “$SOFFICE_PATH/soffice.bin $SOFFICE_ARGS” /dev/null &

-jOrGe W.
Jorge Williams said

February 18 2009 @ 4:13 pm

Whoops… I mean

su – soffice -c “$SOFFICE_PATH/soffice.bin $SOFFICE_ARGS” < /dev/null &> /dev/null &
Chris Schuld said

February 19 2009 @ 8:39 pm

@Jorge,

Thanks! Agreed 100%; thanks for the update/suggestion!
Surj said

April 24 2009 @ 3:59 am

Also add the param -nofirststartwizard to stop it asking you to register, e.g.:

SOFFICE_ARGS=’-accept=”socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp” -headless -nofirststartwizard’
bill said

April 29 2009 @ 2:55 pm

I’m trying this on fedora 10 w/ oo3 (fedora’s 3.0.1-15.3 version) and i can’t seem to get it to work. i have the following oo3 rpms installed:

openoffice.org-ure-3.0.1-15.3.fc10.i386
openoffice.org-headless-3.0.1-15.3.fc10.i386
openoffice.org-core-3.0.1-15.3.fc10.i386
openoffice.org-brand-3.0.1-15.3.fc10.i386

so my command line looks like:

/usr/lib/openoffice.org3/program/soffice.bin -headless -nofirststartwizard -accept=”socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.Service”

if i run that as root from the console, it binds to 8100.

if i run the init script (w/ the same commandline) it doesn’t bind to 8100.

any ideas?
bill said

June 9 2009 @ 6:00 pm

So I changed the init script line to run directly w/ the options, no variables:

${SOFFICE_PATH}/soffice.bin -headless -nofirststartwizard -accept=”socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.Service” > /dev/null 2>&1 &

and it works fine. dunno what the deal is.

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