Build Collabora Office

This is the Collabora Office Windows desktop app (windows/).

Requirements

Collabora Office for Windows is built with Visual Studio 2026, plus a Unix-style toolchain reached through WSL and Git Bash. The windows/.config/ directory in the repo ships WinGet configuration files that set up a build machine for you; apply them, or follow them as a checklist if you prefer to install things by hand.

Visual Studio 2026

Install Visual Studio 2026 Community with the “Desktop development with C++” and “.NET desktop development” workloads. The exact component list is pinned in windows/.config/2026.vsconfig. To install Visual Studio and the required components in one step:

winget configure windows/.config/configuration.winget

(windows/.config/2026_cross.vsconfig lists the extra components for cross-compiling to ARM64.)

Build tools and WSL

Two more WinGet configurations finish the setup. The first must be run as administrator — it downloads jom, make, clang-format, pkgconf and Strawberry Perl Portable, makes sure WSL is installed, and enables Developer Mode (so tar can create native symlinks while unpacking tarballs):

winget configure windows/.config/admin_deps.winget

The second runs as your normal user. It places make, jom, clang-format and pkgconf in ~\bin, extracts Strawberry Perl Portable to ~\co\spp, sets the git options the build needs (protocol.version=2, core.autocrlf=false) and MSYS=winsymlinks:nativestrict, drops a sample ~\co\autogen.input, and installs an Ubuntu 24.04 WSL distro with the packages the engine and online build need (autotools, build-essential, the Python lxml/polib helpers, and Node.js 20 from NodeSource, since 24.04 only ships Node.js 18):

winget configure windows/.config/user_steps.winget

Clone the monorepo

All the source code now lives in a single Gerrit monorepo; the former Collabora Office core is the engine/ subdirectory of the online repo, so there is no separate repository to clone any more. Code review happens on Gerrit, not GitHub pull requests; see the first contribution guide for the full workflow.

From a Git Bash terminal, clone with protocol v2 and CRLF translation turned off:

git clone --config protocol.version=2 --config core.autocrlf=false \
    ssh://YOUR_USERNAME@gerrit.collaboraoffice.com:29418/online collabora-office
cd collabora-office

(If you applied user_steps.winget, those two git options are already set globally.) For an anonymous read-only clone, use https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/online in place of the SSH URL.

Build the engine

If you want a localized (translated) user interface, first clone the translations repository into engine/translations from the top of the clone; the engine’s --with-lang picks up the .po files from there:

git clone https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/translations engine/translations

Change to the engine subdirectory and create an autogen.input. user_steps.winget writes a template to ~\co\autogen.input; a typical Visual Studio 2026 configuration looks like:

--with-distro=CODAWindows
--host=x86_64-pc-cygwin
--with-visual-studio=2026
--with-strawberry-perl-portable=C:\Users\<you>\co\spp
--with-external-tar=C:\Users\<you>\co\co-externaltar

Adjust the paths to match where Strawberry Perl Portable was extracted and where you keep downloaded tarballs. Then run autogen through WSL and build with make from Git Bash:

cd engine
wsl ./autogen.sh
make

If you build the Collabora Office project in Visual Studio in the Debug configuration, you must use an engine build with either --enable-dbgutil or --enable-msvc-debug-runtime.

You will not end up with a runnable Collabora Office Classic — running instdir/program/soffice.exe just prints “no suitable windowing system found, exiting”. You can attempt make check, but it will probably hit some false positives.

Build Collabora Office

Configure

From the top of the clone, run autogen and configure through WSL. POCO, libpng and zstd are built as part of the engine and linked from its workdir by the Visual Studio project, so they no longer need to be built or passed separately (zlib likewise comes from the engine):

wsl --exec bash -c "./autogen.sh"
wsl --exec bash -c "./configure --enable-windowsapp --with-app-name='Collabora Office' --with-lo-builddir='/mnt/c/Users/<you>/collabora-office/engine' --with-lo-path='C:\Users\<you>\collabora-office\engine\instdir' --with-info-url=https://example.com/coda/info.html"

--with-lo-builddir is a WSL (Unix) path, while --with-lo-path is a Windows path — this matters. Change --with-info-url as appropriate; that is the web page shown when clicking the leftmost button in the toolbar.

Build the JavaScript bits

wsl --exec bash -c "(cd browser && make clean && make)"

Build the app

From a Developer Command Prompt for VS 2026, build the solution (/restore fetches the NuGet/.NET dependencies):

msbuild /restore /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x64 windows\coda\CODA.sln

To clean first, run the same command with /t:Clean. You can also build from a WSL shell, as long as PATH has what is needed and you quote the msbuild parameters.

Pre-built download

If you just want a pre-built snapshot for Windows, you can download it here: 👉 https://www.collaboraoffice.com/downloads/Collabora-Office-Windows-Snapshot/