cryptpad/readme.md

A custom self-hosted instance of CryptPad for qcode infra, accessible at https://cryptpad.qcode.ch.

The upstream code lives in the cryptpad sub directory. This is placed as a git subtree, not to be confused with submodule. To customize functionality or look&feel, copy a file from cryptpad/customize.dist into customize and change it. The file will be served in place of the original dist.

See upstream docs for customization details.

Updating from upstream

To update local copy with upstream changes, use tools/pull-cryptpad-upstream.sh script. For example, to pull up to an imaginary release tag xyz, execute:

./tools/pull-cryptpad-upstream.sh xyz

It'll fetch from upstream and add new commits as if they were part of this repo. Finally, git push to update this repo's remote.

If instead you want to make a pull request, first create a branch. Something like git checkout -b upstream-update-xyz master should do. Then execute the above script and send the branch as a pull request.

Then, check whether there were any changes to config files between the last deployed release and the newly pulled version. Most important files to check are the following.

# config.js
git diff v4.14.1..v5.0.0 -- cryptpad/config/config.example.js
# nginx.conf
git diff v4.14.1..v5.0.0 -- cryptpad/docs/example.nginx.conf
# customize/application_config.js
git diff v4.14.1..v5.0.0 -- cryptpad/www/common/application_config_internal.js

Obviously, replace v4.14.1 and v5.0.0 with the appropriate tags.

For the record, initial subtree merge from upstream was done with the following command:

git subtree add -P cryptpad https://github.com/xwiki-labs/cryptpad.git 4.14.0

Contributing to upstream

You'll probably want to have a separate repository, cloned directly from the upstream https://github.com/xwiki-labs/cryptpad.git. Since this repo's cryptpad dir is a copy of the upstream repo, it should be very easy to apply changes to both using patch files and git apply or patch commands.

See details on how to contribute in the upstream docs.

Dev environment

To start a local dev instance, forget about the files in the root of this repo and simply work in the cryptpad sub directory. In other words, follow upstream dev guide.

When done, a git diff will show some changes. Those in the cryptpad/ sub directory should go to upstream. Anything else, notably the customize directory, lives in this repo.

Production instance

To build for prod deployment, you'll need podman. Create prod build artifacts manually with:

./tools/build-prod.sh

The script creates few files in the build directory. Notably, the two files required for prod deployment are:

• cryptpad-container-img-<git-commit-hash>.tar.gz: container file with the nodejs server
• cryptpad-static-<git-commit-hash>.tar.gz: static files served by nginx frontend

Copy both files to production machines. The cryptpad-container-img.tar.gz can be loaded on the machine with:

podman load path/to/cryptpad-container-img.tar.gz

Unpack the static files into a temp dir and sync with the prod dir:

rsync -rl --chown root:root --delete-after tmpdir/ path/to/proddir/

There are also a couple of config files, config.js and nginx.conf, in the root of this repo. These are production configs and will eventually move to another location with all the other prod infra configs.

All the manual steps described above will disappear once a central prod infra is in place.