Etherpad

Etherpad (previously known as “etherpad-lite”) is installed on etherpad.openstack.org to facilitate real-time collaboration on documents. It is used extensively during OpenStack Developer Summits.

At a Glance

Hosts

• http://etherpad.openstack.org

Puppet

• https://opendev.org/opendev/puppet-etherpad_lite/tree/

• system-config: modules/openstack_project/manifests/etherpad.pp

• system-config: modules/openstack_project/manifests/etherpad_dev.pp

Projects

• http://etherpad.org/

• https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite

Bugs

• https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project/748

• https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/issues

Overview

Apache is configured as a reverse proxy and there is a MySQL database backend.

Manual Administrative Tasks

The following sections describe tasks that individuals with root access may need to perform on rare occasions.

Deleting a Pad

On occasion it may be necessary to delete a pad, so as to redact sensitive or illegal data posted to it (the revision history it keeps makes this harder than just clearing the current contents through a browser). This is fairly easily accomplished via the HTTP API, but you need the key which is saved in a file on the server so it’s easiest if done when SSH’d into it locally:

wget -qO- 'http://localhost:9001/api/1/deletePad?apikey='$(cat \
/opt/etherpad-lite/etherpad-lite/APIKEY.txt)'&padID=XXXXXXXXXX'

…where XXXXXXXXXX is the pad’s name as it appears at the end of its URL. If all goes well, you should receive a response like:

{"code":0,"message":"ok","data":null}

Browse to the original pad’s URL and you should now see the fresh welcome message boilerplate for a new pad. Check the pad’s history and note that it has no authors and no prior revisions.