Objective: Install a private instance of Etherpad.org secured with TLS encryption and configuring the system to have good level of controll over who gets to see and edit what i.e. to authenticate the users.
Instructions used:
- Official installation instructions from Etherpad.org that will get you an etherpad you can access on localhost.
- The instructions continue with the “next steps” which probably explain how to hook your Etherpad up with Apache2
- There is a distinct article on configuring the Etherpad to use a web server as a reverse proxy. Going to follow these instrutions since Apache takes ownership of listening to port 443 and thus the inbuilt httpd in Etherpad-lite cannot be applied to serve TLS encrypted. Another way to go about this would be to use another port, such as the default 9001 but I don’t want to mess with my sturdy old firewall settings.
Basic install
Install the dependencies
sudo apt-get install gzip git curl python libssl-dev pkg-config build-essential
You will also need to download and install a working node.js system. The installation manual does recommend against using the version that apt-get installs and go for the downloadable one.
The official Node.js installation guide gives the following instructions for a Debian8:
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_4.x | sudo -E bash -
followed by
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
Which worked just fine installing the nodejs from deb.nodesource.com
Next create the directory where you want Etherpad to reside and git clone into the source tree
git clone git://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite.git
and change directory to there and run
bin/run.sh
and
lynx http://127.0.0.1:9001
and you should see your Etherpad installation.