Upgrading Group-Office on a Synology using Docker

Previously, I've written a post about installing Group-Office on a Synology NAS using Docker. Here's a writeup about how to update Group-Office.

1. Login to the Synology NAS web interface.
2. Launch Docker from the Applications menu.
3. On the "Containers" tab, stop the Group-Office container.
4. Select it and choose "Settings" -> "Export".



5. Save the settings to a folder on the NAS:



6. Delete the group-office container (Don't worry, your data will still be on the NAS).
7. Delete the intermesh/groupoffice image on the "Images" tab.
8. Download the new intermesh/groupoffice image on the "Registry" tab and wait for it to finish in the "Images" tab.
9. Import your previously saved settings file in the "Containers" tab:



10. Launch the updated container
11. Visit the Group-Office web page and the upgrade process should start.
12. Click continue to login to your updated Group-Office!

Install Group-Office on a Synology NAS with Docker

This is a walkthrough on how to install Group-Office on a Synology NAS with docker. Make sure you've installed Docker via the Synology package center.

1. Launch Docker
2. Go to the “Registry” tab and search for “mariadb”. Double click to download the latest:
   
   
3. Search for “groupoffice” and install the latest “intermesh/groupoffice”:
   
   
4. Go to the image tab and double click “maridb” to create a container called “godb”.
5. Click on “Advanced Settings” and set in the “Environment” tab:
   MYSQL_USER=groupoffice
   MYSQL_PASSWORD=groupoffice
   MYSQL_DATABASE=groupoffice
   MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=groupoffice
   
   
6. Create a folder for the “/var/lib/mysql” volume in the “Volumes” tab.
   
   
7. Click “Apply” to create the container.
8. Now double click the “intermesh/groupoffice” container and go to the “Advanced Settings”.
9. In the “Links” tab create a link to “godb” and call it “db”:
   
10. Go to the "Volume" tab and mount a folder on "/var/lib/groupoffice":
    
    
11. Review the “Environment” tab. Set apache server name and email:
    
    
    
12. Check the port settings and launch your browser to the host and port. You should see the Group-Office installation screen. If you get the message "Please create a writable config.,ini" file then either /var/lib/groupoffice is not writable or the database connection can't be established. Please review those if you get that message.
    
13. Finally you must add a scheduled task for GroupOffice. Go to Control Panel -> Task Scheduler on the Synology UI and choose Create -> Scheduled Task:
    
    
    

    
    
    
    

    
    
    
    
    Configure this command:
    
    /usr/local/bin/docker exec --user www-data intermesh-groupoffice1 php /usr/local/share/groupoffice/cron.php
    
14. You're up and running!

Install SSL certificate

You probably need to install an SSL certificate too. This can be done easily. I've generated a Let's encrypt certificate at Control Panel -> Security:

1. Right click on the certificate and choose "Export certificate". 
2. Extract those files in a folder on the synology NAS called "docker/certs".
3. The add a file called "apache.conf" and put this in:
   
   SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/groupoffice/privkey.pem
   SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/groupoffice/cert.pem
   SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/ssl/groupoffice/chain.pem
4. The folder on Docker should look like this:
   
5. Edit the Docker container settings of groupoffice and mount this folder at "/etc/ssl/groupoffice"
   
6. Check the SSL port settings and start the container. You should now have SSL!

Install license files

If you purchased additional modules from Intermesh you can install the licenses by mounting them in the Volume tab:

The Group-Office roadmap 2018

In this post we want to give you an update about the roadmap for Group-Office. Some time ago we announced the development of version 7.0. Version 7.0 was going to be a full rewrite with a completely new PHP backend and a new responsive web interface to replace the current ExtJS interface. We we’re working on this for about 3 years aside the regular Group-Office 6 development and tailor made modules we produce.

Despite that the development resulted in a very nice piece of software, we’re not going ahead with it. The current Group-Office is so feature rich that it was probably going to take another 3 years to completely replace it. Mainly because we’re a small team that’s also doing lots of tailor made modules 50% of the time.

So we decided to make a big change in the path that lies ahead. Group-Office 7.0 was a great learning experience and was packed with very good ideas. We’re going to take these ideas and incorporate them into Group-Office 6 more gradually. So it will slowly transition into what Group-Office 7 was meant to be. A responsive Group-Office with a more intuitive interface.

We think it will be better for our existing customers that can be migrated gradually and they will see new features coming in real soon!

We will start with rewriting the backend. We’ll use a standard protocol called JMAP (http://jmap.io) to support new clients in the future. That’s actually already near completion.

We will then start improving the current ExtJS based interface to work better on mobile devices and also make it more intuitive on the desktop.

Then we will start with redesigning each module one by one. You can keep track of our progress on our roadmap page:

https://www.group-office.com/roadmap

Get sales info with API call.

A customer asked how they could get all sales data from Group-Office on to a television screen. I've written this little script to get this info. Group-Office has no real API (yet) but it is possible to get this data.

The client class is used to connect to Group-Office and get's the year report data which they can use to display.

Because this might be useful to others I've written this tiny blog post:

<?php

class Client {

 private $host;
 private $curl;

 public function __construct($host, $username, $password) {
  $this->curl = curl_init();

  $this->host = rtrim($host, '/');

  curl_setopt($this->curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username . ":" . $password);
  curl_setopt($this->curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
 }

 public function request($route, array $data = array()) {

  curl_setopt($this->curl, CURLOPT_URL, $this->host . '/index.php?r=' . $route);
  curl_setopt($this->curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
  curl_setopt($this->curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($data));

  $json = curl_exec($this->curl);

  return json_decode($json);
 }

 public function __destruct() {
  curl_close($this->curl);
 }

}

$client = new Client('https://example.group-office.com', 'apiuser', 'SECRET');

$data = $client->request('billing/report/yearReport', array(
  'start_date' => '01-01-2017',
  'end_date' => '31-12-2017',
  'books' => json_encode(array('2'))
    )
);

var_dump($data);

Change the Group-Office database collation and character set

Recently we converted the Group-Office database to the collation "utf8mb4_unicode_ci". We did this to support 4 byte unicode characters. Some customers may want to use another collation because of sorting in the database. For example Danish users want to use "utf8mb4_danish_ci". You can choose any collation as long as it starts with "utf8mb4".
You can use this bash script to convert all tables in the database.
Make a backup first!

#!/bin/bash
DB="go61mb4"
COLLATE="utf8mb4_unicode_ci"
USER="root"
PASSWORD="SECRET"

(
  echo 'set foreign_key_checks=0;ALTER DATABASE `'"$DB"'` \
  CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE '"$COLLATE"';'
  mysql -u "$USER" -p"$PASSWORD"  "$DB" -e "SHOW TABLES" --batch --skip-column-names \
  | xargs -I{} echo 'ALTER TABLE `'{}'` \
  CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE '"$COLLATE"';'
) \
| mysql -u "$USER" -p"$PASSWORD" "$DB"

Change the Group-Office database collation and character set

Recently we converted the Group-Office database to the collation "utf8mb4_unicode_ci". We did this to support 4 byte unicode characters. Some customers may want to use another collation because of sorting in the database. For example Danish users want to use "utf8mb4_danish_ci". You can choose any collation as long as it starts with "utf8mb4".
You can use this bash script to convert all tables in the database.
Make a backup first!

#!/bin/bash
DB="go61mb4"
COLLATE="utf8mb4_unicode_ci"
USER="admin"
PASSWORD="mks14785"

(
  echo 'set foreign_key_checks=0;ALTER DATABASE `'"$DB"'` \
  CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE '"$COLLATE"';'
  mysql -u "$USER" -p"$PASSWORD"  "$DB" -e "SHOW TABLES" --batch --skip-column-names \
  | xargs -I{} echo 'ALTER TABLE `'{}'` \
  CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE '"$COLLATE"';'
) \
| mysql -u "$USER" -p"$PASSWORD" "$DB"

Simple monitoring

I was searhing for a simple monitoring tool but most tools out there are very complex. We use 3rd party virtual private servers now so hardware monitoring is not our business. We're interested in monitoring two things:

1. Free disk space
2. CPU load

So I use two simple scripts that send out an e-mail alert when the diskspace is low or the CPU load it too high.

You can create the two scripts below and edit the MAILTO and TRIGGER variables to suit your needs /usr/local/bin/monitor-load.sh:

#!/bin/bash
TRIGGER=2.00
MAILTO=mail@somedomain.com


host=`hostname -f`
load=`cat /proc/loadavg | awk '{print $2}'`
response=`echo | awk -v T=$TRIGGER -v L=$load 'BEGIN{if ( L > T){ print "greater"}}'`
if [[ $response = "greater" ]]
then
        #capture top command output for the mail body
        body=`top -n 1 -b`

        echo "$body\n."|mail -s "High load on $host - [ $load ]" $MAILTO
fi

/usr/local/bin/monitor-disk-usage.sh:

#!/bin/bash
MAILTO=mail@somedomain.com
TRIGGER=80

HOST=`hostname -f`
CURRENT=$(df / | grep / | awk '{ print $5}' | sed 's/%//g')

if [ "$CURRENT" -gt "$TRIGGER" ] ; then

    mail -s "Disk Space Alert for $HOST" $MAILTO << EOF
The root partition of '$HOST' remaining free space is critically low. Used: $CURRENT%
EOF
fi

Make these two scripts executable:

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/monitor-load.sh 
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/monitor-disk-usage.sh

Now schedule these script in system cron jobs:
/etc/cron.d/monitor:

# Check server load and diskspace
* * * * * root /usr/local/bin/monitor-load.sh
0 7,16 * * * root /usr/local/bin/monitor-disk-usage.sh

This will check the server load every minute and disk space at 7am and 4pm. Finally it's wise to test if mails sent from console arrive. Change the e-mail address in this command and run it:

echo "."|mail -s "Test mail from console" mail@somedomain.com