etherpaddy

Etherpaddy is a Pyramid application wrapping etherpad-lite to allow simple actions on etherpad-lite's pads.

Who is it for ?

Etherpaddy has been created to allow a simple use of etherpad-lite inside our team. It doesn't use any groups or sessions.

Features

Etherpaddy provides

• Pad list window
• Custom Pad add page
• Custom Editing page with link to fullscreen mode and deleting mode
• Etherpad-lite custom menu item to allow going back to the pad list from the fullscreen mode

Getting Started

Pyramid is a python web framework. Etherpaddy is also using sqlalchemy and Twitter Bootstrap for design.

Installation

Thoses installation tips are GNU/Linux oriented, but it shouldn't be a problem to install it on other plateforms.

First of all, we suppose you have :

• An etherpad-lite installed and running on your server (or a foreign one). See Etherpad-lite on github
• python-setup-tools and python-virtualenv (apt-get install or yum install or ...)
• An apache webserver with mod_wsgi, mod_proxy, mod_proxy_http and auth_pam

Install etherpaddy

Create a virtualenv, activate, download from github and install:

cd /var/www
virtualenv --no-site-packages env
cd env
source bin/activate
git clone git://github.com/tonthon/etherpaddy.git
cd etherpaddy
python setup.py develop

Configure Etherpaddy

The etherpaddy contains a production.ini file that you should customize to fit your sql configuration. Configure

sqlalchemy.url should be modified to allow connection on the etherpad-lite database etherpaddy.host is the path your server-side pyramid etherpaddy should use to access your pad etherpaddy.apikey is the api key see `Etherpad-lite API`_ etherpaddy.path is the reverseproxied path you use to access etherpad-lite (/etherpad is the sample apache file) filelog handler should also be modified to set the logfile path (a logrotate configuration should be added).

Since the etherpaddy database uses utf8_bin, you need to add some specific attributes to your connection string: Your configuration should look like ; .. code-block:

sqlalchemy.url=mysql://user:pass@localhost/dbname?charset=utf8&use_unicode=0
sqlalchemy.encoding=UTF8
sqlalchemy.convert_unicode = True

The filelog handler should also be modified to set the logfile path and a logrotate configuration should be added.

Customising Etherpad-lite

In order to add a simple button allowing to go back to etherpaddy from inside etherpad-lite (when in fullscreen mode), you should place etherpaddy/etherpad-lite/static/custom/pad.js in etherpad-lite/static/custom/ (don't forget to set the rights to your etherpad user if needed).

Configure Apache

Etherpaddy comes with a pyramid.wsgi file and a sample apache configuration. The pyramid.wsgi file should be placed in the env directory created here above (with the virtualenv command).

The sample configuration :

• Add pam authentication on /
• Reverseproxy etherpad-lite (asserting it runs on the same server on the port 9001)
• Serves our pyramid app on / through wsgi
• Serves static files on /static/

The apache configuration naturally needs some customisation and should be used as any apache conf (placed into /.../apache2/sites-available/ and a2ensite).

You need to manually create a directory under your env/etherpaddy directory and add write access for www-data on it :

mkdir -p /var/www/env/etherpaddy/mako_compiled_templates
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/env/etherpaddy/mako_compiled_templates

Notes on mysql and virtualenv

mysql-python is sometimes a little tricky to install. Since it's a compiled library, it needs some os-wide dependencies. For example, on Debian, you'll need to install python-dev libmysqlclient-dev and build-essential.