Installation

This guide is about installing a public CryptPad instance available on the internet. For instructions about installing and running a local development instance please see the Developer Guide.

Prerequisites

Domains

2 domains or subdomains are needed to take full advantage of CryptPad’s security features. Please see the domains section below for more details.

Hardware

The development team uses and recommends the following hardware requirements as a minimum on the host machine:

  • Debian 12

  • 2GB RAM

  • 2 CPUs

  • 20GB storage (depending on planned usage)

Warning

CryptPad is engineered to maximise privacy, and to minimize the amount of useful information that can be gained even if the host machine is compromised. However it is up to the administrator(s) to ensure that the host machine is secure. The instructions for this are beyond the scope of this guide but best practices include:

  • Disabling password-based SSH access

  • Updating the operating system regularly with any security patches

  • Limiting the number of people who have server access

  • Avoiding insecure applications running in parallel on the same host

  • Updating CryptPad itself regularly

Software

Before starting the installation, ensure the following software is installed:

Install Cryptpad

Docker

While we still prefer the recommended installation method, Docker is now officially supported.

We provide the following files in the CryptPad repository:

  • .dockerignore is useful to remove parts of the repository from the image (avoid making it use too much storage)

  • Dockerfile is used to build the Docker image itself

  • docker-entrypoint.sh allows to configure a few things (domain names and build static assets)

  • docker-compose.yml used to create a container using the image and keep it running

  1. Build your own Docker image

    docker build -t cryptpad/cryptpad:local-latest .

  2. Modify docker-compose.yml with your own values

    • CPAD_MAIN_DOMAIN

    • CPAD_SANDBOX_DOMAIN

    • CPAD_INSTALL_ONLYOFFICE

  3. Set appropriate permissions

    mkdir -p data customize onlyoffice-dist onlyoffice-conf
sudo chown -R 4001:4001 data customize onlyoffice-dist onlyoffice-conf

  4. Run the container with Docker Compose

    docker compose up -d

Note that you'll still need to follow the CryptPad configuration steps, especially Add other administrators. To do that you can mount your config.js file as a Docker volume.

volumes:
- ./data/blob:/cryptpad/blob
- ./data/block:/cryptpad/block
- ./customize:/cryptpad/customize
- ./data/data:/cryptpad/data
- ./data/files:/cryptpad/datastore
- ./onlyoffice-dist:/cryptpad/www/common/onlyoffice/dist
- ./onlyoffice-conf:/cryptpad/onlyoffice-conf
- ./config/config.js:/cryptpad/config/config.js

Install OnlyOffice manually

It is easier to use the script to install OnlyOffice. However, it is also possible to install OnlyOffice manually.

For the first installation you need to clone onlyoffice-builds into your cryptpad folder:

git clone --bare https://github.com/cryptpad/onlyoffice-builds.git

After that, you can check out the different OnlyOffice versions CryptPad uses:

git worktree add www/common/onlyoffice/dist/v1 4f370beb
git worktree add www/common/onlyoffice/dist/v2b d9da72fd
git worktree add www/common/onlyoffice/dist/v4 6ebc6938
git worktree add www/common/onlyoffice/dist/v5 88a356f0
git worktree add www/common/onlyoffice/dist/v6 abd8a309
git worktree add www/common/onlyoffice/dist/v7 9d8b914a

To install x2t, needed for document conversions, you should download x2t.zip from https://github.com/cryptpad/onlyoffice-x2t-wasm/releases, and extract its contents into www/common/onlyoffice/dist/x2t/.

If you want to upgrade OnlyOffice, you need to update the onlyoffice-builds repository. Call this inside the onlyoffice-builds/ folder:

git fetch --all

After that, you can update the different OnlyOffice versions. Check https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad/blob/staging/install-onlyoffice.sh#L31, if the commit hash of a version has changed. If it has changed, check out the updated commit hash. For example:

cd www/common/onlyoffice/dist/v7
git checkout 9d8b914a

Domains

You need two domains to take full advantage of CryptPad’s security features.

  1. The main domain on which users access your instance

  2. A “sandbox” domain or subdomain to which a set of restrictive Content-Security Policy headers are applied

Warning

Using CryptPad in production without the sandboxing system may put users’ information at risk.

The intent of this system is to limit the risk of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities allowing attackers to leak user data. Sensitive computation (like the processing of cryptographic keys) is handled on the main domain, while the user-interface is implemented on the sandbox domain.

The example Nginx configuration file includes the relevant entries to enable the sandboxing system, however, you must configure your instance correctly for it to be effective. You will need:

  1. two domains or subdomains

  2. to include both domains in cryptpad/config/config.js as described in Configure CryptPad

  3. to generate one TLS certificate that covers both domains. The development team uses acme.sh and this is reflected in the example config.

  4. to correctly assign both domains and certificates to the example Nginx configuration

Note

Thanks to community contributions, example configuration files for other reverse proxies than Nginx are also available in the docs/community folder. Please be aware that those are only community supported and not officialy endorsed by the development team.

Install and configure Nginx

CryptPad’s application server handles active connections via websocket and serves static assets (HTML, Javascript, CSS, etc.). This basic configuration is designed to be very easy to configure for small to midsize instances (up to 3000 concurrent users). In a production environment, the development team recommends Nginx with our advanced example configuration for the following reasons:

  1. Scale to many more users by serving static content with a more scalable web-server instead of the single-threaded NodeJS web-server that is built-in

  2. Allow the application server to focus exclusively on handling websocket connections

Warning

CryptPad cannot run in a subfolder. Make sure you configure your server to access it through the root domain or a subdomain.

Note that the version of Nginx distributed by your operating system may not support websockets. We recommend and only support Nginx stable.

To configure Nginx for CryptPad:

  1. Copy the example config file so that it is used/imported by the main Nginx config, for example by placing it in /etc/nginx/conf.d/cryptpad.conf

    • Basic example for small and midsize instances, where everything is processed by NodeJS

    • Advanced example for big instances, where Nginx handle static content and only websocket connections are processed by NodeJS

  2. Edit the configuration file with the correct domains and paths to certificates.

  3. Run openssl dhparam -out /etc/nginx/dhparam.pem 4096 if you haven’t done so already on the host machine.

Static assets and pages such as https://cryptpad.yourdomain.com/index.html should now be accessible at the main domain.

Configure CryptPad

To finalise the installation, ensure cryptpad/config/config.js contains at least:

  • The correct domains:

    • The main domain in place of:

      httpUnsafeOrigin: 'http://localhost:3000',

    • The Sandbox domain in place of:

      httpSafeOrigin: "https://some-other-domain.xyz",

Setup your instance

Once CryptPad is installed, use the URL with the token generated when you ran the server for the first time to start the onboarding workflow.

First, create your administrator account.

../_images/instance_setup_admin.png

Then you can add a logo of your choice (200KB maximum size), change the instance title, description and choose an accent color.

../_images/instance_setup_customize.png

The next step is about chosing the applications to enable (all by default).

../_images/instance_setup_apps.png

The last step let you enable two options:

  • Mandatory Two-Factor Authentication

  • Close registration

../_images/instance_setup_options.png

Note

All these options can be changed later on in the administration panel.

Add other administrators

To make an account instance administrator:

  1. Copy their public key found in User Menu (avatar at the top right) > Settings > Account > Public Signing Key

  2. Paste this key in cryptpad/config/config.js in the following array (uncomment and replace the placeholder):

adminKeys: [
        "[cryptpad-user1@my.awesome.website/YZgXQxKR0Rcb6r6CmxHPdAGLVludrAF2lEnkbx1vVOo=]",
],

  1. Restart CryptPad

Configure support help-desk

The support help-desk can be configured from the Administration panel.

  1. With an instance administrator account, visit the /admin/#support page

  2. Click INITIALIZE HELP-DESK ON THIS INSTANCE

  3. The help-desk is now active

To add other people to the instance support team:

  1. Add them to your contact list

  2. Choose from the list shown below

  3. Click ADD

To remove someone from the instance support team, simply click the cross at the end left of their display name.

Build static pages & Open Graph metadata

To build some of CryptPad static pages & enable social media link previews, run the following command:

npm run build

This creates an index.html page for each application in the customize/www directory. It is not recommended to perform manual modifications on these pages as they will be overridden the next time npm run build is run.

To modify the preview images please see Open Graph preview images

Note

Updating to a newer version of the software in the future without re-running this command may result in outdated code.

Change the server’s cryptography library (optional)

In CryptPad, the server and client use the same cryptography library called TweetNaCl. This choice was made to keep the codebase simple, and to avoid introducing extra dependencies. However, this design shows its limitation on large-scale instances where the server-side cryptographic operations can be costly, thus slowing down the server.

To alleviate this issue, CryptPad plugins can be used to replace the server's cryptographic library with a more computationally efficient one. For example, the flagship instance CryptPad.fr uses the Sodium library through our CryptPad Sodium plugin. To install it, first download the plugin in the right location. Starting from the root of your CryptPad instance, do the following:

cd lib/plugins
git clone https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad-sodium-plugin sodium

Then, install its dependencies:

cd sodium/
npm ci

Finally, restart your CryptPad server. It should now be using Sodium on the server.

Diagnostics

CryptPad provides a diagnostics page that runs instance configuration tests. Visit https://cryptpad.yourdomain.com/checkup/ after completing all of the steps above to ensure everything is correctly configured.

Support

The development team is available to provide paid support contracts (see our pricing page), otherwise, requests for assistance can be directed to the community.

We recommend you to go over our forum and or admins Matrix channel.

Note that community support is provided by volunteers, please be aware of what you are asking of them and respect our Code of Conduct at all time.