Setting up etherpad with postgres on Windows

2012-12-27T11:20:36-08:00

There don’t seem to be any successful installation instructions for postgres on Windows. It’s not that hard, but there are a couple things you need to do.

I haven’t gone through these instructions to make sure they work, but this is roughly what I’ve done to get my Postgres/Windows/Node/Etherpad working together:

Install git
Install node.js
Install python
- add PYTHON as an env
Install postgres
- add C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.2\bin to your path
Download etherpad-lite with git
Run the etherpad-lite windows installer per the instructions
start etherpad-lite
- make sure it works with the dirty DB before getting exotic
Set up postgres
- npm install pg (will throw an error about msbuild version, but ignore that, the native JS drivers are installed)
- add a user using pgadmin
- add a DB using pgadmin and the user created a second ago
- reconfigure to use postgres in the settings.json file
Run start.bat to make sure it works
Turn down the log messages to only ERROR in the settings.json file.
Use NSSM to daemonize it, per the instructions here.

Note that NSSM doesn’t yet have stdout and stderr redirection built in. Thus, to start the daemon with these working, you have to create a little script like this:

@ECHO OFF
@REM This runs etherpad with stdout and stderr getting redirected to special logs
call D:\etherpad\etherpad-lite\start.bat >> D:\etherpad\etherpad-lite\logs\stdout.log 2>> D:\etherpad\etherpad-lite\logs\stderr.log

Michael Jay Lissner

Setting up etherpad with postgres on Windows