packaging request: etherpad

[mnajib]

Project description Etherpad is a real-time collaborative editor scalable to thousands of simultaneous real time users. It provides full data export capabilities, and runs on your server, under your control.

Metadata

• homepage URL: https://etherpad.org/
• source URL: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite
• license: Apache License v2
• platforms: unix, linux, darwin, windows

[stale[bot]]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

[xfnw]

a module for this would be nice too

[wlcx]

I gave this a bit of a go today; ran into quite a lot of issues trying to package with buildNPMModule:

• etherpad is using the old npm lockfile version, I had to regenerate it with npm and add a patch, otherwise fetch-npm-deps complained about missing hashes
• etherpad's install script does some kind of funky symlinking of itself back into node_modules - without this trying to resolve dev deps fails (even if you set npmInstallFlags = [ "--omit=dev" ]) because etherpad-cli-client depends on ep_etherpad-lite. To fix this I patched to remove etherpad-cli-client from devdependencies
• There's no build step, so you need to set dontNpmBuild = true;
• It tries to find it's own base path and makes assumptions about what it looks like, so you have to patch AbsolutePaths.js to account for it
• Once you actually get it to run, it shells out to npm to try to find installed plugins, so you need to set makeWrapperArgs to include a path to npm.
• And even then, once you get it to run with a config file so it doesn't try to create a database file in the nix store, it will break due to trying to read files with hard-coded path prefixes.

At this point I decided that was enough computering for one day. Here's a gist with where I got to: https://gist.github.com/wlcx/b6cec22ddc9e6b1869bc9a30262ae08f

[augustebaum]

Looks like someone worked on this during Summer of Nix 2022: https://github.com/ngi-nix/etherpad-nix Not tested or documented though.