Operations grimoire/Etherpad

Shared between Nasqueron and Wolfplex

The same Etherpad installation is served at two domains:

• https://pad.wolfplex.be/
• https://pad.nasqueron.org/

Upgrade

The easiest way is to spin a new container.

You can also upgrade code in the live container, updating Git code then restarting Node.

Procedure A - upgrade container

First, pull new image and remove old container on Equatower:

$ docker pull nasqueron/etherpad
$ docker stop pad
$ docker rm pad
$ rm /srv/etherpad/.ok*

Then, on the Salt master, spin the new container:

$ cd /opt/salt/nasqueron-operations
$ salt docker-002 state.apply roles/paas-docker/containers/etherpad

If something weird happens after the update:

• if you forget to remove /srv/etherpad/.ok-plugins, plugins won't be reinstalled
• if you forget to remove /srv/etherpad/.ok-apikey, you'll get an API key issue (see below)
• if you forget to remove /srv/etherpad/.ok-abiword, abiword won't be reinstalled

To use `rm /srv/etherpad/.ok*` on Equatower and then repplay the roles/paas-docker/containers/etherpad state works to fix the situation, as those three steps can be done when the container is live.

Procedure B - upgrade code

$ docker exec -it pad bash
$ git pull
…
Updating 2e81b39..45266f9
…
$ logout
$ docker restart pad 
$ docker logs pad 
…
[2016-08-25 00:40:24.711] [INFO] console - Your Etherpad version is 1.6.0 (45266f9)

Check the two versions match.

Note most recent code lives in the develop branch, not the master one.

Maintenance tasks

Delete a pad

As no admin dashboard plugin is installed, there are two methods to delete a pad:

• Send manually a request to https://pad.wolfplex.be/api/1/deletePad?apikey=APIKEY&padID=PADTODELETE
• Use the rOPS: roles/paas-docker/wrappers/files/pad-delete.py script fo send the request:
  ssh equatower pad-delete $PADTODELETE.

In the past, the few delete pad requests occurred for privacy reasons. Privacy is an acceptable justification to delete a pad.

Repair

There are scripts to delete a pad or to repair a corrupted pad.

Those are documented at https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/wiki/Getting-to-know-the-tools-in-bin

Past known issues

Instability

When a copy/paste was done, server could crash.

This has been fixed by switching database to utf8mb4_bin:

ALTER DATABASE `etherpad` CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_bin;
ALTER TABLE `etherpad.store` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_bin;

Missing plugins

The installation requires two plugins, provided as npm packages:

• ep_ether-o-meter
• ep_author_neat2

They are included in the nasqueron/etherpad image.

API key issue

http://www.wolfplex.be/pad/ could be empty. When that occurs, the API key on this site diverges from ours.

They store their API on Ysul at /var/dataroot/wolfplex/secrets.json.

On the Docker engine, API key should be available at /srv/pad/APIKEY.txt

Vault secrets migration.

This service have secrets. They should be properly migrated in Vault.