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 documents.

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, 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.

Mimetype Detection

Automatic Configuration

Ownpad now automatically tries to register MIME types by editing /config/mimetypemapping.json and /config/mimetypealiases.json files. To do so, the config directory should be editable by the user used to execute the PHP code.

Manual Configuration

This step can also be done manually.

First, you should add the following content in the /config/mimetypealiases.json file:

{
    "application/x-ownpad": "pad",
    "application/x-ownpad-calc": "calc"
}

Then, you should add the following content in the /config/mimetypemapping.json file:

{
    "pad": ["application/x-ownpad"],
    "calc": ["application/x-ownpad-calc"]
}

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/.

Then you should copy the MIME type icons from Ownpad to the Nextcloud core:

cp apps/ownpad/img/{calc,pad}.svg core/img/filetypes

Finally, you should update the mimetypelist.js file using the following command:

php occ maintenance:mimetype:update-js

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

HTTP Auth

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.

Etherpad-managed Authentication

Ownpad supports communication with the Etherpad API for access restriction (so called protected pads).

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 credentials (either the API key for Etherpad 1.x or the client ID/client secret for Etherpad 2.x). Please refer to the next section to find out how to configure Etherpad.

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,
}

Etherpad Authentication

If you are using Etherpad 1.x, then authentication is using a single API key secret. You can find your API key in the APIKEY.txt file of your Etherpad instance. This API key should be put in Ownpad settings.

If you are using Etherpad 2.x (at least 2.0.3 is required), then, you should first configure your Etherpad’s settings.json file to add a new service account. You should give that account admin credentials. You should add the following snippet (you should adjust client_id and client_secret to strong values):

{
  # …
  "sso": {
    # …
    "clients": [
      # …
      {
        "client_id": "client_id",
        "redirect_uris": [],
        "response_types": [],
        "grant_types": ["client_credentials"],
        "client_secret": "client_secret",
        "extraParams": [
          {
            "name": "admin",
            "value": "true"
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Then, you should push that secrets in Ownpad configuration after having enabled the OAuth2 authentication mode.

License

The code is licensed under the AGPLv3 which can be found as the file COPYING in the source code repository.