HotCRP is awesome software for managing review processes, especially for academic conferences. It supports 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 tagging. It has been widely used in computer science conferences and for internal review processes at several large companies.
HotCRP is the open-source version of the software running on hotcrp.com. If you want to run HotCRP without setting up your own server, use hotcrp.com.
Extensive online help has more on configuring and using HotCRP. See also:
HotCRP runs on Unix, including Mac OS X. It requires the following software:
You may need to install additional packages, such as php73, php73-fpm, php73-intl, php73-mysqlnd, zip, poppler-utils, and sendmail or postfix.
Run lib/createdb.sh
to create the database. Use lib/createdb.sh OPTIONS
to pass options to MariaDB, such as --user
and --password
. Many MariaDB
installations require privilege to create tables, so you may need sudo lib/createdb.sh OPTIONS
. Run lib/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
. You must ensure that your PHP can read this file; it
is marked as world-unreadable by default.
If you don’t want to run lib/createdb.sh
, you will have to create your
own database and user, initialize the database with the contents of
src/schema.sql
, and create conf/options.php
(using
etc/distoptions.php
as a guide).
Edit conf/options.php
, which is annotated to guide you.
Configure your web server so that all accesses to the HotCRP site are
handled by HotCRP’s index.php
script. The right way to do this depends on
your choice of server. We recommend using php-fpm
with Nginx, but Apache
also works. In the following examples, SITE/testconf
is configured for a
HotCRP installation in /home/kohler/hotcrp
.
Nginx: Configure Nginx to redirect accesses to php-fpm
and the HotCRP
index.php
script. This example code would go in a server
block, and
assumes that php-fpm
is listening on port 9000:
location /testconf/ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(/testconf)(/[\s\S]*)$;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /home/kohler/hotcrp/index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
}
Apache with mod_proxy and php-fpm
: Add a ProxyPass
.
ProxyPass "/testconf" "fcgi://localhost:9000/home/kohler/hotcrp/index.php"
(If your site path is "/"
, you will need something like ProxyPass "/" "fcgi://localhost:9000/home/kohler/hotcrp/index.php/"
—note the trailing
slash.)
Apache with modphp (not recommended)_: Add a ScriptAlias
for the
HotCRP index.php
script and a <Directory>
for the installation.
ScriptAlias "/testconf" "/home/kohler/hotcrp/index.php"
<Directory "/home/kohler/hotcrp">
Options None
AllowOverride none
Require all denied
<Files "index.php">
Require all granted
</Files>
</Directory>
General notes: Everything under the site path (here, /testconf
)
should be served by HotCRP. This normally happens automatically, but if the
site path is /
, you may need to turn off your server’s default handlers
for subdirectories such as /doc
.
The images
, scripts
, and stylesheets
subdirectories contain static
files that any user may access. It is safe to configure your server to
serve those directories directly, without involving PHP.
Update PHP settings.
The first three settings, upload_max_filesize
, post_max_size
, and
max_input_vars
, may be changed system-wide or in HotCRP’s .htaccess
and
.user.ini
files.
upload_max_filesize
: Set to the largest file upload HotCRP should accept.
15M
is a good default.
post_max_size
: Set to the largest total upload HotCRP should accept. Must
be at least as big as upload_max_filesize
. 20M
is a good default.
max_input_vars
: Set to the largest number of distinct input variables
HotCRP should accept. 4096
is a good default.
The last setting, session.gc_maxlifetime
, must be changed globally. 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 edit conf/options.php
to set $Opt["sessionLifetime"]
to the correct session timeout.
Edit MariaDB’s my.cnf (typical locations: /etc/mariadb/my.cnf
or
/etc/mariadb/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.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 MariaDB or 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 database server.
Enable a mail transport agent, such as Postfix or Sendmail. You may need help from an administrator to ensure HotCRP can send mail.
Sign in to the site to create an account. The first account created automatically receives system administrator privilege.
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 .user.ini
(or .htaccess
if using Apache).
HotCRP PHP scripts can take a lot of memory. By default HotCRP sets the PHP memory limit to 128MB.
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"]
.
Run php batch/backupdb.php
at the shell prompt to back up the database.
This will write the database’s current structure and comments to the
standard output. As typically configured, HotCRP stores all paper
submissions in the database, so the backup file may be quite large.
Run php batch/backupdb.php -r 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 SQL command prompt for the
conference database.
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
HotCRP is available under the Click license, a BSD-like license. See the LICENSE file for full license terms.
Eddie Kohler, Harvard