Install Etherpad

What Etherpad is

An empty text window in the browser where several people write at the same time and see each other's letters appear. Each participant gets their own color, so you can see who wrote what. No login, no account: whoever has the link takes part.

It sounds like Google Docs, and the difference is that you run it yourselves. The text sits on your own server and not with someone else, which is the whole point when you are writing something you do not want to put in a cloud service.

Etherpad is not a program for making polished documents. It is a program for getting text down fast, together: meeting notes, lists of ideas, a script for a video, that text for the website that three people have opinions about. When it is finished, you copy it onward to the tool that will format it.

This is a server program

Unlike a drawing program, Etherpad is not installed with an installation file. It runs in Docker, which means the program is in a ready-made package that is started with a command. If you do not have Docker yet, start with the guide Install Docker and come back here.

Windows and Linux Mint

The command is the same on both. On Windows you write it in PowerShell with Docker Desktop running, on Mint in Terminal.

docker run -d --name etherpad -p 9001:9001 etherpad/etherpad

The first time, the package is downloaded, which takes a few minutes. Then you open http://localhost:9001 in the browser and see the Etherpad start page. We have run exactly this command, and Etherpad started right away with the latest version available at the time.

For your colleagues to connect, localhost is not enough, because that word means this computer. Then they need the computer's address on the network instead, and if you are on the office network the firewall may stop it. That is something to test in advance and not five minutes before the meeting.

Three things to do first

1. Create a pad with a name you will remember instead of the random suggestion. The address then becomes /p/vecka38 and can be typed in by hand.
2. Click the timeline icon at the top right and drag the slider. Etherpad saves every change, so you can rewind to how the text looked the day before yesterday.
3. Ask someone to open the same link on another computer and write at the same time for a minute. You need to see that it actually works before you rely on it during a real meeting.

The most common trap

Believing that the text is safe. If you start Etherpad with the command above, the program uses a simple built-in database called DirtyDB, and Etherpad says so itself in the log: it is not recommended for production use. The data sits in a Docker volume that is created automatically without you asking for it. If you delete the container with docker rm, the volume actually remains, but nameless and hard to find again. Run docker rm -v if you want to be sure that everything is really gone, and give the volume a name with -v etherpad_data:/opt/etherpad-lite/var when you start it if you want to be able to find and reuse it.

For a few weeks of meeting notes it is good enough, provided that you know about it. If Etherpad is to live long term, add a real database and a volume so that the text sits outside the container. The project's own compose file on GitHub shows what it looks like with Postgres.

And remember the first paragraph: whoever has the link is in. Do not forward the link to a pad where things are written that should not be spread.