Server configuration for CollabPads

CollabPads is available from BlueSpice 4.5.

Simultaneous editing of pages by multiple users requires some server preparation. For this, MongoDB and the CollabPadsBackendService must be installed.

Install MongoDB

Please install MongoDB according to the documentation your Linux distribution. It can then be started and configured for auto start like this:

sudo systemctl start mongod
sudo systemctl enable mongod

Install php-mongodb extension

The CollabPadsBackend service required a special PHP extension in order to be able to communicate with the MongoDB server. This extension is available through PECL. If you don't have PECL installed already, you can do this for example using

sudo apt install php-devel
sudo pecl install mongodb

Check the path of your PHP version to find the proper INI file. The extension can then be enabled e.g. via

echo "extension=mongodb.so" >> /etc/php/8.2/cli/php.ini

Install CollabPadsBackendService

The CollabPadsBackendService is pre-buildt a PHP application that can be downloaded from buildservice.bluespice.com. You can download it like this:

cd /opt
wget https://buildservice.bluespice.com/webservices/4.5.x/CollabPadsBackend.tar.gz
tar xzf CollabPadsBackend.tar.gz

To configure the service one must first create a config.php file. An example file is included.

cd CollabPadsBackend
cp config.example.php config.php
vim config.php

Modify config.php` to match your environment. Example:

<?php

return [
	'server-id' => 'mediawiki-collabpads-backend',
	'ping-interval' => 25000,
	'ping-timeout' => 5000,
	'port' => 8099,                //The port you wish to use
	'request-ip' => '127.0.0.1',  //The ip you want to open your service  
	'baseurl' => 'https://yourwikiurl.com', 
	'db-type' => 'mongo',
	'db-host' => '127.0.0.1',   // your MongoDB-Host
	'db-port' => 27017,         // your MongoDB-Port
	'db-name' => 'collabpads',  // your MongoDB-DB-Name
	'db-user' => '',           // MongoDB-Username 
	'db-password' => '',       // MongoDB-Password
	'log-level' => 'INFO',
	'http-client-options' => []
];

Next you should create a proper servicedescriptor for running the application

sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/collabpad.service

Example of collabpad.service:

[Unit]
Description = BlueSpice-CollabpadsBackend
[Service]
Type = simple
User = www-data
ExecStart =/usr/bin/php /opt/CollabpadsBackend/bin/server.php
StandardOutput = file:/var/log/apache2/collabpad.log
[Install]
WantedBy = default.target

Start and configure the service for auto start like this:

sudo systemctl enable collabpad.service
sudo systemctl start collabpad.service

Configure Apache

The new service must be reachable by the client. By default the wiki application will try to connect to it using the WebSocket protocol on the /_collabpads subpath relative to the wiki application base URL ($wgServer ).

In order to achieve this, you must add a proper URL rewrite rule. For the Apache Webserver it looks like this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}  ^/_collabpads          [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} transport=websocket    [NC]
RewriteRule /(.*)           ws://127.0.0.1:8099/$1 [P,L]

The webserver needs to be restarted to load the changes:

systemctl restart apache2

You should now be able to use the editing mode Edit together.

Edit together

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