Custom user profiles with unoconv

Miklos Vajna — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 09:57:46 +0000

Background: I was benchmarking Online vs jodconverter vs unoconv the other day for Collabora’s document conversion page. One problem with measuring unoconv performance was that it provided no ways to run multiple unoconv processes in parallel, while the underlying soffice binary obviously allows this.

So while unoconv is not capable of launching the soffice process in a chroot (improves security), nor is capable of forking an already pre-initialized soffice process (improves performance, both are things Online can do for you), there is no real reason why you should not be able to run multiple unoconv processes in parallel. The previously mentioned benchmarking would be quite unfair if even this kind of multiprocessing would be ignored, but unoconv had no way to specify a custom user profile, which has to be different for each soffice process.

So I filed a GitHub pull request on 1st Jun, and finally it was merged on 10th Aug.

Here is how you can use it for example:

unoconv --user-profile /tmp/tmpf_yreswi -f pdf --port 2002 test.txt

Note	It’s your responsibility to give --port a unique value, but that’s not too hard: if you use a thread pool to launch the `unoconv` processes, then you can add the thread index to a base port and that will give you a unique port.

So this is available in unoconv master (towards unoconv 0.8.2+1), you can grab the sources from git and try it out right now. :-)

What is Miklos hacking - unoconv

Custom user profiles with unoconv