Installation of Etherpad

Etherpad logo
Etherpad is a free system for collaborative editing of text documents well suited to both working in parallel and serially. It is provided courtesy of the Etherpad Foundation and the developers

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:


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.