New installation

katt

This is my last resort in trying to get my cryptpad instance back up and running. I had one running successfully on a raspberry pi for about a year, behind cloudflare and using Apache2. Then I had a catastrophic drive failure of the external drive I was using, and I was not able to successfully reinstall Cryptpad and get it running from the backup. It would run, but even with all the old configs, I could not log in or get anywhere past the login screen.

So I now have been trying to get a new instance to work, and I am about to give up because it seems the authors are not very interested in truly supporting self-hosting and I base that opinion on the outdated and fragmented documentation for new installs.

From a clean slate, I ran the instructions found here: https://docs.cryptpad.org/en/admin_guide/installation.html

This got me to the point where running 'node server' worked and it gave me an install link as per the recommended install instructions. One thing I had to change was the cryptpad version, as the 2025.12.0 clone no longer exists and an error was thrown. I sorted out that the current version, contrary to the documentation, is 2026.5.1 so I changed that in the install process: git clone -b 2026.5.1 --depth 1 https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad.git cryptpad and git checkout 2026.5.1

This resulted in a basic, working install.

Then onto Domains and getting nginx to run, everything fails, mostly due to ssl certs.

After trying to get things to work on my own for a while, I searched this forum and found this page: https://forum.cryptpad.org/d/2344-unable-to-deploy-production-server-while-following-admin-guide

Then followed the instructions found in there and tried the instructions recommended here: https://blog.cryptpad.org/2022/12/12/tutorial-nginx-tls-acme/

That tutorial is also broken. nginx will not run without certs and acme.sh will not obtain a cert without nginx running.

I'm already frustrated with this entire thing because it seems all the documents my kids and I collaborated on in various writing projects are now gone, and now this absolutely abysmal documentation has had me wasting time for days.

I'm going to see what kind of responses I get here and if I can get this sorted out and get the instance running without a lot of headaches then I will continue to use Cryptpad. If not, I will be moving on to another opensource alternative to G**gle. There has to be something.

TIA

katt

OK... an entire day, no response. Moving on to another platform. Cryptpad is obviously no longer supported. Too bad, because it was a pretty good system.

AlexQ

Hello katt,

in my experience as a CryptPad user one gets faster responses via the chat channel, but forum usually makes more sense. Also to my experience as an open source user in general answers in open source community forums can also take several days or longer. But I would not assume that a open source project is no longer supported due to longer answer times. Regarding CryptPad for example there are several active threads in the CryptPad forum. But your and my opinion and experience may differ, of course.

Anyway, if you like, try the chat channel:

https://matrix.to/#/#cryptpad:matrix.xwiki.com

Good luck and success! :-)

AlexQ

@katt Some additional comments:

Yes, I got sometimes confused by the CryptPad manual, too. But only a bit. It seems you have mainly problems with nginx regarding certificates. Everything else sounds to be ok. One does not know, how much nginx experience you have, especially regarding error analysis.

run nginx -t to check your nginx config
post your nginx config (but check before, if it contains "private" information you don't want to share; usually there should be no private information)
write something about your server environment, especially OS plus version
describe in how far nginx is not running, it should run a simple http site, even if you have no certificate (so maybe start over with a default nginx config)
you can use certbot instead of acme.sh to get a certificate: certbot --nginx -d cryptpad.mydomain.example -d sandbox.mydomain.example

As long as there is no special CryptPad problem you can also try to get nginx support in other forums like the nginx community forum or the forum of your OS. But again, please keep in mind, that open source communites may take some time to answer. Usually voluntary users answer questions or members of the project, IF they don't already have much other stuff to do ;-)

If you could answer the named points your chance is greater that some user or some CryptPad team member can help you.

KredilyHong

I'd also recommend checking the server logs during the first startup if anyone else gets stuck - they usually point you in the right direction much faster than guessing. A clean install with the latest documentation also saves a lot of headaches.

SLaSZT

It doesn't really help that the NGINX tutorial is from 2022 and not written in a user-friendly way, even glossing over some important steps like where to put your NGINX certificates (!!!). Additionally, acme.sh isn't the easiest method (from a beginner/homelab sysadmin perspective).

There should be a tutorial that uses certbot instead, which is relatively painless IMO and has a Docker container that I run with cron when needed.