About

Etherpad lite is a really-real time collaborative editor spawned from the Hell fire of Etherpad. We're reusing the well tested Etherpad easysync library to make it really realtime. Etherpad Lite is based on node.js what makes it much lighter and more stable than the original Etherpad. Our hope is that this will encourage more users to install a realtime collaborative editor. A smaller and well documented codebase makes it easier for developers to improve the code. Etherpad Lite is optimized to be easy embeddable. Look at our FAQ Page

Online demo
Visit http://pitapoison.de:9001 to test it live.
You can find the same instance behind a nginx, with ssl and in a subpath here -> https://pad.pitapoison.de/pad/

Etherpad vs Etherpad Lite

	Etherpad	Etherpad Lite
Size of the folder (without git history)	30 MB	1.5 MB
Languages used server side	Javascript (Rhino), Java, Scala	Javascript (node.js)
Lines of server side Javascript code	101410	5330
RAM Usage immediately after start	257 MB	16 MB

Installation

As root:

1. Install all dependencies. We need the sqlite development libraries, gzip, git, curl, libssl develop libraries and python
   apt-get install libsqlite3-dev gzip git-core curl python libssl-dev


2. Install node.js
   1. Download the latest 0.4.x node.js release from http://nodejs.org/#download
   2. Extract it with tar xf node-v0.4*
   3. move into the node folder cd node-v0.4* and build node with ./configure && make && make install
3. Install npm curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

As any user (we recommend creating a separate user called etherpad-lite):

4. Clone the git repository git clone 'git://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite.git'
    
5. Install the dependencies with bin/installDeps.sh (if you have problems at this step, look at the section Troubleshooting below)
    
6. Start it with bin/run.sh
    
7. Open your web browser and visit http://localhost:9001. You like it? Look at the 'Next Steps' section below

Troubleshooting

It fails while installing the sqlite dependency

The sqlite package of some Linux versions (including debian lenny) is too old. We need sqlite >=3.6. You have to use a PPA or debian backports. You find sqlite packages for Ubuntu Hardy here, Debian Backports can be found here

It fails while installing the express dependency, it says my node version is wrong

You might have installed node.js version 0.5. You can check that with node --version. Please reinstall node 0.4.x

My installation process stopped, now it doesn't work anymore, what can I do?

Remove the node_modules folder. This forces run.sh to reinstall all dependencies

Next Steps

You can modify the settings in the file settings.json

You can update to the latest version with git pull origin. The next start with bin/run.sh will update the dependencies

Look at this wiki pages:

• How to deploy Etherpad Lite as a service
• How to put Etherpad Lite behind a reverse Proxy
• How to customize your Etherpad Lite installation

You can find more information in the wiki. Feel free to improve these wiki pages

Develop

If you're new to git and github, start here http://learn.github.com/p/intro.html.

If you're new to node.js, start with this video http://youtu.be/jo_B4LTHi3I.

You can debug with bin/debugRun.sh

If you wanna find out how Etherpads Easysync works (the library that makes it really realtime), start with this PDF (complex, but worth reading it).

You know all this and just want to know how you can help? Look at the TODO list. You can join the mailinglist or go to the freenode irc channel #etherpad-lite-dev

You also help the project, if you only host a Etherpad Lite instance and share your experience with us.

Modules created for this project

• ueberDB "transforms every database into a object key value store" - manages all database access
• doc.md "A simple JSDoc documentation tool that creates markdown for node.js modules exports" - is used to generate the docs
• channels "Event channels in node.js" - ensures that ueberDB operations are atomic and in series for each key

License

Apache License v2