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Etherpad Server in the Pangolin Environment

Etherpad is a collaborative web-based text editing and chat environment. For more information see https://etherpad.org/ or https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite

This is accomplished in two steps:

  1. Run the pangolin_base_server.yml playbook.
  2. Run the etherpad_server.yml playbook.

Generally speaking a given playbook should only be run (successfully) once. If it's been run and it's called out somewhere, consider that a met dependency.

If you start the Pangolin environment at that point the http://world.pangolin/ home page will have a link to Etherpad at http://etherpad.pangolin:9001/

How do I know if it's working?

One way to see if all of the required services are running is with systemctl list-dependencies pangolin.target. The bullets should show green for running services.

Before you run the playbooks

Copy global_vars.yml.sample to global_vars.yml and make any required changes. By default it is planning to own the entirety of 10.0.0.0/8; if that's not to your liking, you should do something about it.

Replace the entry under [pangolin_server] in the hosts file with your build target.

Download distributions of NodeJS ("Linux Binaries" .tar.xz from https://nodejs.org/en/download/) and Etherpad ("Linux/Mac" .zip from https://etherpad.org/) and store them somewhere where your Ansible server can find them. (/opt/downloads/ is shown in the sample global_vars) The script expects those two archive formats, respectively. If you want to do something else you'll have to change how the script handles unpacking them.

While the playbook is running, or if it fails for a random reason

If one of the scripts fails to run because of an error, then you need to fix it; you may even need to restart with a freshly paved VM. However because of connectivity issues or other sorts of random events either or both of the scripts may fail to complete successfully the first time through.

The pangolin_base_server playbook is more or less idempotent; if for some reason it fails to install something because it can't reach the archive, then wait a while and run it again. It should skip anything that's already been done.

In the etherpad_server playbook there are two places where something can go wrong. The first is during installation of dependencies at the beginning, in which case just restart. When you get to the point where it's unpacking the distributions, it may be idempotent but it's not guaranteed; hopefully failure is not likely at this point.

The second place where failure is likely is quite close to the end when it's running the Etherpad application for the first time. It's necessary to do this because Node pulls in quite a lot of stuff and it needs to do this before the application can be run successfully offline. If the script fails at this point, log into the box and see if it's still running; if so, consider just letting it run until it answers on port 9001. You can manually shut it down with systemctl stop etherpad.service.

Hangs while running the Etherpad application for the first time

No, really hangs. Nothing is happening. Did you set the sudo access for the privileged account as ALL = (ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL? It needs to sudo to the etherpad account for this step.

After running the playbooks

The pangolin.target exists as a way to manage the components collectively with systemctl.

As already mentioned, systemctl list-dependencies pangolin.target will show you the status of the required services. systemctl start pangolin.target will start all of them.

By default pangolin.target is left enabled which means that systemctl stop pangolin.target will stop all of them, but it also means that starting one of the individually (e.g. apache or etherpad) will start them all. If you want to be able to start them individually then disable pangolin.target by running systemctl disable pangolin.target.