Ownpad — Etherpad and Ethercalc links in Nextcloud

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 document.

Configuration

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, a must configure a Host. Additional public host provider more public Host-Provider

Example:

• Etherpad Host https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/
• Ethercalc Host https://ethercalc.org/

Afterwards, the “pad” and/or “calc” items will be available in the “+” menu from the “File” app.

Mimetype detection

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

Create access restricted pads

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,