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 provided by Git Bash and an MSYS2 installation — no WSL needed. 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.

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.

Install Git Bash, then from that 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.

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 MSYS2

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, installs MSYS2 (to C:\msys64) and Node.js LTS, 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 the MSYS2 packages the engine and online build need (autotools, pkgconf, gcc, flex, bison, gperf, nasm, zip, gettext, and Python with the lxml/polib helpers):

winget configure windows/.config/user_steps.winget

Build everything with one command (optional)

Rather than building the engine and the app through the separate steps below, windows/coda/build/ offers a front-end that drives both from a single out-of-tree build directory - one autogen.sh, one make.

From a Git Bash terminal, make an empty build directory outside the clone and create an autogen.input in it with the engine configure flags, then run the front-end and build:

mkdir C:/co-build && cd C:/co-build
echo --with-distro=CODAWindows > autogen.input   # add the rest of the flags (see "Build the engine")
C:/path/to/online.git/windows/coda/build/autogen.sh
make

autogen.sh configures the engine; make then builds the engine, configures and builds the online part, and builds the Visual Studio solution, dispatching the steps that need a Unix environment to MSYS2 automatically. The build is incremental, and editing autogen.input reconfigures the engine on the next make. It is out-of-tree only, and the engine configure flags must live in autogen.input (they are not accepted as command-line arguments).

The build produces a runnable tree in the build directory at online/windows/coda/x64/<Configuration>/program/, with Collabora Office.exe next to the engine and browser files copied in beside it.

The app is built in the Debug configuration by default; pass make CONFIG=Release for a Release build. This has to match the engine: a Debug app needs an engine built with --enable-dbgutil or --enable-msvc-debug-runtime, so choose the engine flags in autogen.input to suit (see the note under “Build the engine”).

The online configure options are make variables: APP_NAME, VENDOR, INFO_URL, plus ONLINE_CONFIGURE_ARGS for anything else, e.g. make CONFIG=Release APP_NAME='Collabora Office Preview' VENDOR='Collabora Productivity Limited'. Changing any of them re-runs the online configure on the next make.

The sections below describe the same build done by hand, which you still want when running or debugging the pieces individually.

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, from Git Bash, run autogen through MSYS2 (the run-msys2 helper starts an MSYS2 shell with the right environment) and build with make:

cd engine
./solenv/bin/run-msys2 ./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 MSYS2. 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):

./engine/solenv/bin/run-msys2 ./autogen.sh
./engine/solenv/bin/run-msys2 ./configure --enable-windowsapp --with-app-name='Collabora Office' --with-lo-builddir='/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 Unix (/c/...) 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

./engine/solenv/bin/run-msys2 make -C browser

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 Git Bash, as long as PATH has what is needed and you use - instead of / for the msbuild switches (the MSYS argument conversion would rewrite /nologo and friends into paths).

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/