Etherpad-Go: A real-time collaborative editor for the web

Etherpad-Go is a performance focused 1 to 1 rewrite of Etherpad-Lite in Go. The old implementation was written in NodeJS and was still in CommonJS. A new implementation in Go allows us to take advantage of Go's concurrency model, static typing, and performance optimizations.

Etherpad is a real-time collaborative editor scalable to thousands of simultaneous real time users. It provides full data export

Requirements to get started

• Go 1.20+
• NodeJS 22+
• Pnpm

Installation

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/ether/etherpad-go.git
    cd etherpad-go

2. Create the ui:

   cd ui
   pnpm install
   cd ../admin
   pnpm install
   node build.js

3. Build the Go server:

   go build -o etherpad-go ./main.go

4. Copy the binary where you want to run it

5. For customization and configuration, copy the settings.json.template to settings.json and edit it to your needs.

6. Run the server:

   ./etherpad-go

7. Etherpad should start within less than a second. Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:9001 to access the Etherpad interface.

Docker

You can also run Etherpad-Go using Docker. Here's how to do it:

Build it your own

1. Build the Docker image:

   docker build -t etherpad-go .

2. Use a prebuilt one which is available at GitHub Container Registry

Starting the Docker Container

You can start the Docker container with a postgres database with docker compose:

docker compose up -d

This will start both the Etherpad-Go server and a Postgres database. The server will be accessible at http://localhost:9001. You can find the docker compose file in docker-compose.yml