Etherpad is a fantastic tool for collaboration and text sharing among colleagues. It’s docker container can be easily deployed in a Kubernetes cluster and you can tie it to a database for some persistence if you like.
However this persistence can prove problematic sometimes, as you may accidentally share stuff that you shouldn’t, or share stuff for longer than you should. For this reason, it is fairly easy to use the Etherpad API and implement a job that deletes old pads, left unedited after some time. And this is what I did:
- deletePad.py – the Python script that does the thing
- cronjob.yaml – example Kubernetes CronJob to run this periodically
- yiorgos/deletepad – ready made docker container if you trust me
Yes, there are Etherpad plugins that do the same, but I did not want to mess around with my deployment and add one more ConfigMap to support the settings for Etherpad and the like.
Originally, and because I link Etherpad to a Postgres, I was expiring old pads using pg_cron, but this was not the cleanest of solutions, because until restaring the Etherpad, the pad remained in the process’s memory and was serviceable, even though not on the database. And that is why I resorted to using the API.
Managing organized complexity 