Setup local EtherPad server on Ubuntu for collaborative word processing in real-time

As indicated in this blog post, after Google acquired EtherPad, the team will be working for Google Wave, and the code of EtherPad is open source.

Google Wave is still in preview right now and not very stable/usable. But, Etherpad is mature!

EtherPad is the only web-based word processor that allows people to work together in really real-time.

When multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are instantly reflected on everyone's screen. The result is a new and productive way to collaborate on text documents, useful for meeting notes, drafting sessions, education, team programming, and more.

Looks exactly what I am searching for ......

I decide to give a try. I followed the instruction on Google Code and adjusted several things.

First, I install sun-java-6 and mysql-database from apt-get, with the current version in Intrepid rep.

Second, I edit my .bashrc file to export several things

export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun"
export SCALA_HOME="/home/test/scala-2.7.7.final"
export JAVA="$JAVA_HOME/bin/java"
export SCALA="$SCALA_HOME/bin/scala"
export PATH="$JAVA_HOME/bin:$SCALA_HOME/bin:$PATH"
export MYSQL_CONNECTOR_JAR="/home/test/mysql-connector-java-5.1.10/mysql-connector-java-5.1.10-bin.jar"

Third, I download the EtherPad source by

hg clone https://etherpad.googlecode.com/hg/ etherpad

The following changes were made under etherpad/trunk/etherpad
* I modified bin/setup-mysql-db.sh script, change both

${mysql} -u root

to

mysql -u root -p

* compile by bin/rebuildjar.sh and run by bin/run-local.sh
* after many lines / 1-2 minutes, I saw the following

HTTP server listening on http://localhost:9000/
53.246: [GC 53.246: [DefNew: 13688K->684K(14784K), 0.0198410 secs] 28350K->15347K(1046976K) icms_dc=0 , 0.0203440 secs] [Times: user=0.02 sys=0.00, real=0.02 secs]

My local EtherPad server is running!!

With the run-local.sh method, I can only visit the server by http://localhost:9000/, not even http://127.0.0.1:9000/. Shutdown the server by killing the process of run-local.sh will NOT lose the edited file, as long as I recorded the unique ID/unique URL, such as http://localhost:9000/oxGxeX02uZ

What I need is to modify the run-local.sh script and make it visible for WWW. Then, I can just send an email with the unique URL to the person I want to collaborate with and we can edit the file at the same time ......

Here are some test images

create a new pad

various functions

nice play back page - reminds me the Google Wave playback

even on the same computer, I can use two different browsers (Chrome/Firefox) to achieve a pseudo collaboration in really real-time


btw, I really like the lower-right chat tab