Running openoffice/libreoffice as a service

So, you’re trying to use JODConverter or unoconverter, you’ve set up openoffice to launch as a service in the background somewhere, but it’s not going anywhere, and all you’re seeing in your logs is

creation of executable memory area failed: Permission denied
creation of executable memory area failed: Permission denied
creation of executable memory area failed: Permission denied
creation of executable memory area failed: Permission denied

The solution, my friend, is to make sure that the openoffice process gets a writable path in its HOME environment variable. In my case, the supervisord config entry looks like this:

[program:openoffice]
command=/usr/lib64/openoffice/program/soffice.bin -headless -nofirststartwizard -accept="socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.Service"
environment=HOME="/tmp"
user=www-data

Hopefully this will save someone else the hour of fruitless hackery that I’ve been through to get to this point.