Ownpad is a Nextcloud application that allows to create and open Etherpad and Ethercalc documents. This application requires to have access to an instance of Etherpad and/or Ethercalc to work properly.
Note that the documents are only stored with your Etherpad/Ethercalc service provider; no copy is kept on Nextcloud. As documents are created this way Nextcloud is not responsible for the documents security, e.g. anyone with access to the Etherpad/Ethercalc service can access your documents.
In order to make Ownpad work, go to the configuration panel (Settings / Admininstration / Additional Settings) and fill in the necessary data within the “Ownpad (collaborative documents)” section.
Set a Etherpad Host:
To be able to process the document, you must configure a Host. Find more public providers at the Etherpad-Lite wiki
Example:
- Etherpad Host https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/
- Ethercalc Host https://ethercalc.net/
Note that most browsers will only display the content if both Nextcloud and Etherpad/Ethercalc are served via HTTPS.
Afterwards, the “pad” and/or “calc” items will be available in the “+” menu from the “File” app.
Unfortunately, apps can’t declare new mimetypes on the fly. To make
Ownpad work properly, you need to add two new mimetypes in the
mimetypemapping.json file (at Nextcloud level).
To proceed, just copy /resources/config/mimetypemapping.dist.json to
/config/mimetypemapping.json (in the config/ folder at Nextcloud’s
root directory; the file should be stored next to the config.php
file).
For the snap-distribution of Nextcloud the template file can be found under /snap/nextcloud/current/htdocs/resources/config/mimetypemapping.dist.json and the active config-folder by default is /var/snap/nextcloud/current/nextcloud/config/.
Afterwards add the two following lines just after the “_comment” lines.
"pad": ["application/x-ownpad"],
"calc": ["application/x-ownpad"],
If all other mimetypes are not working properly, just run the following command:
sudo -u www-data php occ files:scan --all
For the snap-distribution that is
sudo nextcloud.occ files:scan --all
Basic HTTP auth enabled on the Etherpad webserver is compatible with Ownpad. If this is used then the user will simply be prompted to enter login credentials by their browser when they try to access a pad from within Nextcloud.
Ownpad supports communication with the Etherpad API for access restriction (so called protected pads). This support is considered experimental due to work in progress; some features are still missing. See the TODO.md for details.
Protected pads need to be accessed via Nextcloud in order to gain access privileges.
In order for this to work, you’ll need to enter your Etherpad API key
within the Ownpad settings. You can find your API key in the
APIKEY.txt file of your Etherpad instance.
In addition you’ll need to host your Etherpad and Nextcloud instances
under the same domain. For example, you can host your Etherpad in
pad.example.org and your Nextcloud in cloud.example.org. For this
example, you’ll have to set the cookie domain to example.org within
the Ownpad settings.
If you want to create truly private pads, you have to dedicate an
Etherpad instance for Nextcloud running both with HTTPS. You will then configure Etherpad to
restrict pad access via sessions and pad creation via the API.
For this, you have to adjust your Etherpad configuration file
(settings.json) as following:
"requireSession" : true,
"editOnly" : true,
The code is licensed under the AGPLv3 which can be found as the file COPYING in the source code repository.