CommunityData:Etherpad

Our group typically takes real-time notes in Etherpad which is a little like Google Docs but for text files and with color everywhere to see who is working where and who has written what. There are a number of different Etherpad servers out our server is: https://etherpad.communitydata.science/

To create a new page, just go to https://etherpad.communitydata.science/ and type in the name of the page. It's a good idea to make it unique/descriptive and to include a date. A good name might be. Etherpads are public webpages. You can choose a pagename that is random or might be difficult to guess but you cannot make one that is truly private.

Semi Private Pads
You can make a semi-private one by including the word "private" in front of the pad name. For example, if you name your pad  people will be asked for a username and password shared with the group. You can ask other folks in the group for the username or password or you can find by searching the email list archives for the collective-XXXX@communitydata.science email lists.

Administration for Etherpad
To maintain Etherpad we need to update the git repository on our etherpad server (anhel). Every time we do this, we'll first run these commands:

Upgrading Etherpad to new upstream version
To upgrade "everything" it should be enough to do this (after running the command above):

Then, run the following command as root:

Installing a plugin
If we wanted to install the  plugin we would (a) fun the first two commands above to get into the right directory (do not run these as root or from some other directory!) and then run the following command:

Once, again, we will restart Etherpad running the following command as root:

Backing up Etherpads (optional/deprecated)
Etherpads should not be treated as long term storage. Although we have no plan to purge things from our own server, there's no promise that they will be kept across upgrades and server migrations either. As a result, we have a system to backup our Etherpads. It runs once a days and keeps a backup copy each day. We can use the backups to go back to any old copy of any Etherpad so you can safely blow away old text and know you will be able to get the archived text back if you need it.

That said, we need to register every Etherpad that we want backed up first. To do that, we need to first check out  repository from the group Git repository with a line in your terminal like:

If you get a permission denied errors, follow the instructions on CommunityData:Git to get setup to use the CDSC git repository.

To start backing up a new Git repository, you should add a new line to the bottom of. The lines should look like:

As you can see, comments following  are supported in the file. They are not required.

The complete workflow should look like: