HotCRP Conference Review Software
HotCRP is the best available software for managing the conference review process, including paper submission, review and comment management, rebuttals, and the PC meeting. Its main strengths are flexibility and ease of use in the review process, especially through smart paper search and an extensive tagging facility. It is widely used in computer science conferences and for internal review processes at several large companies.
HotCRP also has weaknesses. It requires that you run your own server, and it does not natively support multitrack conferences (although you can hack something together).
Prerequisites
HotCRP runs on Unix, including Mac OS X. It requires the following software:
- Apache, http://apache.org/ (You may be able to use another web server that works with PHP.)
- PHP version 5.3 or higher, http://php.net/
- Including MySQL and GD support
- MySQL version 5 or higher, http://mysql.org/
- The zip compressor, http://www.info-zip.org/
- pdftohtml, http://poppler.freedesktop.org/ (Only required for format checking.)
Apache is preloaded on most Linux distributions. You may need to install additional packages for PHP, MySQL, and GD, such as:
- Fedora Linux: php-mysql, php-gd, zip, (poppler-utils)
- Debian Linux: php5-common, php5-gd, php5-mysql, libapache2-mod-php5 (or libapache-mod-php5 for Apache 1.x), zip, (poppler-utils)
- Ubuntu Linux: php5-common, php5-gd, php5-mysql, libapache2-mod-php5 (or libapache-mod-php5 for Apache 1.x), zip, (poppler-utils), and a package for SMTP support, such as sendmail
You may need to restart the Apache web server after installing these
packages (sudo apachectl graceful
or sudo apache2ctl graceful
).
pdftohtml notes: HotCRP and the banal script use pdftohtml for paper format checking. As of 2013, many current Unix distributions ship with a suitable version of pdftohtml, such as “pdftohtml version 0.18.4, Copyright 2005-2011 The Poppler Developers.” Older versions of pdftohtml may not be suitable. In particular, version 0.40a can be hundreds of times slower than other versions, and version 0.39 doesn’t understand the most current PDF standard. If your pdftohtml is bad, try installing Geoff Voelker’s patched version of pdftohtml; see http://www.sysnet.ucsd.edu/sigops/banal/download.html.
Load notes: HotCRP requires a system with at least 256MB of memory, more if paper format checking is used and submission load is expected to be high. If you run HotCRP in a virtual machine, make sure you configure suitable swap space! HotCRP uses the fast, but less reliable, MyISAM database engine. If MySQL is killed your database may be corrupted.
Installation
-
Run
lib/createdb.sh
to create the database. Uselib/createdb.sh OPTIONS
to pass options to MySQL, such as--user
and--password
. Many MySQL installations require privilege to create tables, so you may needsudo lib/createdb.sh OPTIONS
. Runlib/createdb.sh --help
for more information. You will need to decide on a name for your database (no spaces allowed).The username and password information for the conference database is stored in
conf/options.php
, which HotCRP marks as world-unreadable. You must ensure that your web server can read this file, for instance by changing its group. -
Edit
conf/options.php
, which is annotated to guide you. (lib/createdb.sh
creates this file based onsrc/distoptions.php
.) -
Redirect Apache so your server URL will point at the HotCRP directory. (If you get an Error 500, see "Configuration notes".) This will generally require adding a
<Directory>
for the HotCRP directory, and an Alias redirecting a particular URL to that directory. This section of httpd.conf makes "/testconf" point at a HotCRP installation in /home/kohler/hotcrp; it works in Apache 2.2 or earlier.<Directory "/home/kohler/hotcrp"> Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride all Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> Alias /testconf /home/kohler/hotcrp
Apache 2.4 or later requires this instead.
<Directory "/home/kohler/hotcrp"> Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride all Require all granted </Directory> Alias /testconf /home/kohler/hotcrp
Note that the first argument to Alias should NOT end in a slash. The "AllowOverride all" directive is required.
All files under HOTCRPROOT (here, "/testconf") should be served by HotCRP. This normally happens automatically. However, if HOTCRPROOT is
/
, you may need to turn off your server’s default handlers for subdirectories such as/doc
. -
Update the systemwide setting for PHP’s
session.gc_maxlifetime
configuration variable. This provides an upper bound on HotCRP session lifetimes (the amount of idle time before a user is logged out automatically). On Unix machines, systemwide PHP settings are often stored in/etc/php.ini
. The suggested value for this setting is 86400, e.g., 24 hours:session.gc_maxlifetime = 86400
If you want sessions to expire sooner, we recommend you set
session.gc_maxlifetime
to 86400 anyway, then editconf/options.php
to set$Opt["sessionLifetime"]
to the correct session timeout. -
Edit MySQL’s my.cnf (typical location:
/etc/mysql/my.cnf
) to ensure that MySQL can handle paper-sized objects. It should contain something like this:[mysqld] max_allowed_packet=32M
max_allowed_packet must be at least as large as the largest paper you are willing to accept. It defaults to 1M on some systems, which is not nearly large enough. HotCRP will warn you if it is too small. Some MySQL setups, such as on Mac OS X, may not have a my.cnf by default; just create one. If you edit my.cnf, also restart the mysqld server. On Linux try something like
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart
. -
Sign in to the site to create an account. The first account created automatically receives system administrator privilege.
If your server configuration doesn’t let .htaccess files set options, Apache will report an “Error 500” when you try to load HotCRP. Change your Apache configuration to
AllowOverride All
in the HotCRP directory, as our example does above.
You can set up everything else through the web site itself.
-
Configuration notes
-
Uploaded papers and reviews are limited in size by several PHP configuration variables, set by default to 15 megabytes in the HotCRP directory’s
.htaccess
(or.user.ini
if you are using php-fpm). -
HotCRP PHP scripts can take a lot of memory, particularly if they're doing things like generating MIME-encoded mail messages. By default HotCRP sets the PHP memory limit to 128MB.
-
HotCRP benefits from Apache’s
mod_expires
andmod_rewrite
modules; consider enabling them. -
Most HotCRP settings are assigned in the conference database’s Settings table. The Settings table can also override values in
conf/options.php
: a Settings record with name "opt.XXX" takes precedence over option $Opt["XXX"].
-
Database access
Run lib/backupdb.sh
at the shell prompt to back up the database.
This will write the database’s current structure and comments to the
standard output. HotCRP stores all paper submissions in the database,
so the backup file may be quite large.
Run lib/restoredb.sh BACKUPFILE
at the shell prompt to restore the
database from a backup stored in BACKUPFILE
.
Run lib/runsql.sh
at the shell prompt to get a MySQL command prompt
for the conference database.
Updates
HotCRP code can be updated at any time without bringing down the site.
If you obtained the code from git, use git pull
. if you obtained
the code from a tarball, copy the new version over your old code,
preserving conf/options.php
. For instance, using GNU tar:
% cd HOTCRPINSTALLATION
% tar --strip=1 -xf ~/hotcrp-NEWVERSION.tar.gz
Multiconference support
HotCRP can run multiple conferences from a single installation. The last directory component of the URL will define the conference ID. For instance:
http://read.seas.harvard.edu/conferences/testconf/doc/testconf-paper1.pdf
^^^^^^^^
conference ID
The conference ID can only contain characters in [-_.A-Za-z0-9], and
it must not start with a period. HotCRP will check for funny
conference IDs and replace them with __invalid__
.
To turn on multiconference support, set $Opt["multiconference"] to
true in conf/options.php
. You will then need to tell HotCRP how to
find the options relevant for each conference. The most flexible
mechanism is to use $Opt["include"] to include a conference-specific
options file. For example (note the single quotes):
$Opt["include"] = 'conf/options-${confid}.php';
The ${confid}
substring is replaced with the conference ID. HotCRP
will refuse to proceed if the conference-specific options file doesn’t
exist. To ignore nonexistent options files, use wildcards:
$Opt["include"] = 'conf/[o]ptions-${confid}.php';
${confid}
replacement is also performed on these $Opt settings:
dbName, dbUser, dbPassword, sessionName, downloadPrefix, conferenceSite,
paperSite, defaultPaperSite, contactName, contactEmail, emailFrom,
emailSender, emailCc, and emailReplyTo.
Each conference needs its own database. Create one using the
lib/createdb.sh
script (the -c CONFIGFILE
option will be useful).
Also, make sure Apache uses the HotCRP install directory for all
relevant URLs.
You can also set $Opt["multiconferenceAnalyzer"] to a regular expression, a space, and a replacement pattern. HotCRP matches the full input URL to the regex, then uses the replacement pattern as the conference ID. For example, this setting will use "conf_CONFNAME" as the conference ID for a URL like "http://CONFNAME.crap.com/":
$Opt["multiconferenceAnalyzer"] = '\w+://([^./]+)[.]crap[.]com[.]?/ conf_$1';
License
HotCRP is available under the Click license, a BSD-like license. See the LICENSE file for full license terms.
Authors
Eddie Kohler, Harvard/UCLA
- HotCRP is based on CRP, which was written by Dirk Grunwald, University of Colorado
- banal by Geoff Voelker, UCSD