This will be a breaking change for some people.
We removed all internal password control logic. If this affects you, you have two options:
1. Use a plugin for authentication and use session based pad access (recommended).
1. Use a plugin for password setting.
The reasoning for removing this feature is to reduce the overall security footprint of Etherpad. It is unnecessary and cumbersome to keep this feature and with the thousands of available authentication methods available in the world our focus should be on supporting those and allowing more granual access based on their implementations (instead of half assed baking our own).
This is a departure from previous versions, which did not limit import/export
requests. Now such requests are ALWAYS rate limited. The default is 10 requests
per IP each 90 seconds, and also applies to old instances upgraded to 1.8.3.
Administrators can tune the parameters via settings.importExportRateLimiting.
From Etherpad 1.8.3 onwards, the maximum allowed size for a single imported
file will always be bounded.
The maximum allowed size can be configured via importMaxFileSize.
The mechanism used for determining if the application is being served over SSL
is wrapped by the "express-session" library for "express_sid", and manual for
the "language" cookie, but it's very similar in both cases.
The "secure" flag is set if one of these is true:
1. we are directly serving Etherpad over SSL using the native nodejs
functionality, via the "ssl" options in settings.json
2. Etherpad is being served in plaintext by nodejs, but we are using a reverse
proxy for terminating the SSL for us;
In this case, the user has to be instructed to properly set trustProxy: true
in settings.json, and the information wheter the application is over SSL or
not will be extracted from the X-Forwarded-Proto HTTP header.
Please note that this will not be compatible with applications being served over
http and https at the same time.
The change on webaccess.js amends 009b61b338, which did not work when the SSL
termination was performed by a reverse proxy.
Reference for automatic "express_sid" configuration:
https://github.com/expressjs/session/blob/v1.17.0/README.md#cookiesecureCloses#3561.
freddii
John McLear
Richard Hansen
Daniel Krol
Paul Tiedtke
muxator
Sebastian Castro