I’ve used the etherpad at riseup.net for years, but recently (and without explanation) my employer blocked everything on riseup.net. Etherpad is a super simple collaborative authoring tool that combines a basic word processor with a chat utility. It’s great for working with folks outside of your institution and for avoiding google workspace or microsoft 365. It’s also great when you want a document (or the draft of a document) to automatically delete itself. There is a ‘timeline’ feature that allows a group of collaborators to see revisions and to roll back changes. Etherpad removes a bunch of unhelpful word processing features but provides features that help folks get down to work quickly to hammer out documents together. I especially like how it helps me avoid accumulating digital detritus.

Etherpad’s home screen.

Installing Etherpad

So, you’ll need a Reclaim Cloud account if you don’t have one. Etherpad isn’t something you can install on shared hosting, unfortunately, because it runs on node.js. So head on over to Reclaim Cloud.

Once you’ve signed in, click on the Marketplace link

Then look for the Etherpad option among the installers for the many applications there.

Next, name your environment and select the region for your data center. I left my Display Name the default. If you are only using Etherpad for a short amount of time, the us.reclaim.cloud environment works great. If you’re thinking of keeping Etherpad around for longer, you can also associate a purchased domain name with it. I won’t go into that in this walk through, but there are instructions for how to do that, generally speaking, within the copious Reclaim Cloud support documents.

When the installer completes, you still need to make a few small adjustments. Most obvious, there is no way to access the ADMIN area. We’ll need to set the admin user and password variables, and I couldn’t figure out a way to do this through the shell or by making changes to Etherpad’s settings.json file. Instead, Taylor pointed me to another way.

Click the little sprocket among the icons next to the Etherpad instance you installed, and select Variables. You’ll be shown a table that allows you to set, at the very least, the ADMIN_PASSWORD. You can set other variables contained within the settings.json file, too. If something isn’t present, click on Add. A full list of what you can set is available at the etherpad-lite github page.

Once those are set, you will want to restart the Etherpad server by hovering over the Etherpad server and clicking the stop button. Then, do that again, clicking on the start button.

Give it a beat to start up, then visit your Etherpad in your browser and append /admin/ to the end of your URL. For example: https://something-sassy.us.reclaim.cloud/admin/. The default Etherpad administrative username is admin, so unless you changed it, use that. When you’ve authenticated, you will see the Admin Dashboard which will look very much like this:

Installing Plugins

Etherpad has several plugins that make it do cool things. But I found that some of them broke my stuff and forced me to delete and re-install my Etherpad. So here’s a helpful tip — CLONE IT FIRST!

Back on the Reclaim Cloud Dashboard, clone your environment by clicking on this icon:

If the plugin you are installing and evaluating isn’t awesome, you can delete your primary environment and use the clone to set things back to scratch. After I installed a plugin, I tested everything on my Etherpad. Then, I’d blow away the clone, and clone my Etherpad server again. Incrementally, I worked through my list of Etherpad plugins until I got the setup I wanted.

A full list of available Etherpad plugins is available at https://static.etherpad.org/index.html. I’d recommend sticking with the “official” plugins. Even then, some broke my stuff.

Installing a plugin, thankfully, is dead simple. From the Etherpad Admin Dashboard, click on Plugin Manager. I liked keeping the list of plugins linked above open in one tab, and then searching for the plugin to install in the Admin Dashboard. Supposing I want the etherpad_author_hover plugin, I just click the Install button.

Next, I jumped back to my Reclaim Cloud dashboard, stopped my server and restarted it, and then tested everything out. If my site broke, I rolled things back and skipped that plugin. If it worked, I’d re-clone my server and move on to the next plugin. When I was finished, I stopped my clone (to save a few pennies) but I kept it around.

Here are a few plugins I installed that I like very much, and that work without a hitch:

• ep_adminpads3
• ep_align
• ep_announce
• ep_author_neat2
• ep_font_color
• ep_font_size

Finally, if you’re looking for a bit of privacy, name your pads (each document in an Etherpad) after a randomly generated and complex password. I just use my password safe to spit out a name. If your Etherpad server is configured like mine, you have to know the name of the pad to access it.

I’ve had my Etherpad server running for about 10 days, and even with all the cloning and configuring, it has cost me about 60 cents a day. I haven’t had more than a handful of simultaneous users, but assuming I had 100+ then I might increase the number of cloudlets (right now I have 3). Even then, I might expect to run an Etherpad server for under $1 per day.

Reach out via Reclaim’s Discord if you have any questions. Thanks for reading and I hope this is helpful.