Note: Before you try to deploy file search office documents preview, make sure other parts of your seafile cluster are already working, e.g upload/download files in a web browser. Make sure memcached is configured as described in “Deploy in a cluster”.

Enable search and background tasks in a cluster

In the seafile cluster, only one server should run the background tasks, including:

  • indexing files for search
  • email notification
  • office documents converts service
  • LDAP sync
  • virus scan

Let’s assume you have three nodes in your cluster: A, B, and C.

  • Node A is backend node that run background tasks.
  • Node B and C are frontend nodes that serving requests from clients.

cluster-nodes

Configuring Node A (the backend node)

If you following the steps on settings up a cluster, node B and node C should have already be configed as frontend node. You can copy the configuration of node B as a base for node A. Then do the following steps:

Install Dependencies (Java, LibreOffice, poppler)

On Ubuntu/Debian:

  1. sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre libreoffice poppler-utils python-uno # or python3-uno for ubuntu 14.04+

On CentOS/Red Hat:

  1. sudo yum install java-1.7.0-openjdk
  2. sudo yum install libreoffice libreoffice-headless libreoffice-pyuno
  3. sudo yum install poppler-utils

Edit seafevents.conf and ensure this line does NOT exist:

  1. external_es_server = true

Edit seahub_settings.py and add a line:

  1. OFFICE_CONVERTOR_NODE = True

Edit seafile.conf to enable virus scan according to virus scan document

Edit the firewall rules

In your firewall rules for node A, you should open the port 9200 (for search requests). For versions older than 6.1, es_port was 9500.

Configure Other Nodes

On nodes B and C, you need to:

  • Edit seafevents.conf, add the following lines:
    1. [INDEX FILES]
    2. external_es_server = true
    3. es_host = <ip of node A>
    4. es_port = 9200

Edit seahub_settings.py and add a line:

  1. OFFICE_CONVERTOR_ROOT = 'http://<ip of node A>'

Make sure requests to http:// is also handled by Seahub. For example, you may need to add this Nginx configuration in the background node:

  1. server {
  2.     listen 80;
  3.     server_name <IP of node A>;
  4.     location / {
  5.         proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:8000;
  6.         ...
  7.   }

As a simple test, you can use this command to test if you set it up correctly.

  1. curl -v http://<IP of node A>/office-convert/internal/status/

It should say “400 Bad Request” when you have Nginx config updated.

Start the background node

Type the following commands to start the background node (Note, one additional command seafile-background-tasks.sh is needed)

  1. ./seafile.sh start
  2. ./seahub.sh start # or "./seahub.sh start-fastcgi" if you're using fastcgi
  3. ./seafile-background-tasks.sh start

To stop the background node, type:

  1. ./seafile-background-tasks.sh stop
  2. ./seafile.sh stop
  3. ./seahub.sh stop

You should also configure Seafile background tasks to start on system bootup. For systemd based OS, you can add /etc/systemd/system/seafile-background-tasks.service:

  1. [Unit]
  2. Description=Seafile Background Tasks Server
  3. After=network.target seahub.service
  5. [Service]
  6. Type=forking
  7. ExecStart=/opt/seafile/seafile-server-latest/seafile-background-tasks.sh start
  8. ExecStop=/opt/seafile/seafile-server-latest/seafile-background-tasks.sh stop
  9. User=root
  10. Group=root
  12. [Install]
  13. WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then enable this task in systemd:

  1. systemctl enable seafile-background-tasks.service

The final configuration of the background node

Here is the summary of configurations at the background node that related to clustering setup.

For seafile.conf:

  1. [cluster]
  2. enabled = true
  3. memcached_options = --SERVER=<IP of memcached node> --POOL-MIN=10 --POOL-MAX=100

For seahub_settings.py:

  1. OFFICE_CONVERTOR_NODE = True
  3. AVATAR_FILE_STORAGE = 'seahub.base.database_storage.DatabaseStorage'
  4. COMPRESS_CACHE_BACKEND = 'django.core.cache.backends.locmem.LocMemCache'

For seafevents.conf:

  1. [INDEX FILES]
  2. enabled = true
  3. interval = 10m
  5. [OFFICE CONVERTER]
  6. enabled = true
  7. workers = 1
  8. ## how many pages are allowed to be previewed online. Default is 50 pages
  9. max-pages = 50
  10. ## the max size of documents allowed to be previewed online, in MB. Default is 10 MB
  11. ## Previewing a large file (for example >30M) online is likely going to freeze the browser.
  12. max-size = 10