Libreoffice --headless se niega a convertir a menos que sea root, no funcionará desde el script PHP

I finally found an answer to this... Add:

export HOME=/tmp &&

to the beginning, so:

export HOME=/tmp && libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf:writer_pdf_Export /my/path/foo.ppt --outdir /my/path

That worked for me on CentOS 6.5, and as shell_exec() in PHP.

We faced the same issue when running the soffice binary headless (LibreOffice 5.0.5.2) in a CloudFoundry (Diego) container as part of a NodeJS app.

It seems newer versions of libreoffice do not expect a writeable HOME, but try to write to TMPDIR.

strace mostró: 8349 mkdir("app/tmp", 0777) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) 8349 open("app/tmp/lu8349pzgegi.tmp", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL, 0600) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

con TMPDIR=app/tmp

Lo arreglamos configurando TMPDIR to a directory that is writeable by the App process' user, i.e. TMPDIR=/tmp on CloudFoundry:

process.env.TMPDIR = "/tmp";

All what you need to do - create folder "/var/www/.config". When you try to convert some file under www-data user libreoffice require ".config" dir in user's home directory. But libreoffice has no permissions to create such folder. User www-data default home directory is "/var/www". So just run commands:

sudo mkdir /var/www/.config
sudo chmod 700 /var/www/.config
sudo chown www-data /var/www/.config

I had this same error, but the problem wasn't root access. The command was wrong.

This worked for me, getting text from a doc in LibreOffice 4.2.:

soffice --headless --convert-to txt:Text file_to_convert.odt

(http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/14130/how-do-i-install-filters-for-the-soffice-command/)

I was able to get over this issue by deleting the file first and then running the convert file. Looks like the overwrite of the file failed due to file owner issues.

For me it was due to unwritable output folder. Use --outdir and specify a writeable folder.

If output file already exists, it will overwrite automatically.

Ejemplo:

$ libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf --outdir myfolder/ myfile.docx

The environment variables used by LibreOffice are listed here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Environment_variables#System_Variables

The environment variable in question seems to be related to XDG_CONFIG_HOME (consulte la sección del https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html#variables) but setting it does not solve the issue.

So the best that we can do is in the line of the answer from greatmatter

HOME=/tmp libreoffice ...

Much as Jacek stated in his comment, make the user you are trying to execute the command as a sudoer with no password required. Then change your libreoffice command to be

sudo libreoffice <rest of command>

Worked for me. I had the same issue.

You can not run libreoffice soffice binary with www-data user. Use a user with sudo privilege instead. Check my Gist https://gist.github.com/nathanielvarona/423bda9e4a8a4f0f9bbf#file-soffice-listener-sh

And since you are going to use this in PHP. Just give a try also to PHP-FPM. Install it and then modify the /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf file.

De

user = www-data 
group = www-data

A:

user = ubuntu
group = ubuntu

I've successfully run this in AWS EC2 and also with my VBox VMs.