HotCRP Conference Management on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

HotCRP is the conference management system behind many of computer science's most selective conferences. It handles the full life cycle of academic peer review: authors register and submit papers, the program committee bids on and is assigned reviews, reviewers submit and discuss their evaluations, and chairs run discussion and make accept/reject decisions - all from one web application. This image delivers the whole platform assembled and hardened, so a working submission and review site is ready within minutes of launch instead of after an afternoon of manual installation.

A self managed deployment of HotCRP means installing and tuning a web server, PHP and its extensions, a database engine, and a local mail path, then creating the database, loading the schema, writing the configuration by hand, and hardening every credential involved. This image completes all of that before first boot. Compared with a community install you also get 24/7 expert support from cloudimg covering conference setup, reviewer management, mail delivery and upgrades.

Application stack: HotCRP 3.4 served by nginx and PHP 8.3 FPM, with MariaDB holding the conference database and a local Postfix instance providing the outgoing mail path for notifications. HotCRP routes every request through its own front controller, so paper pages, the search and review interfaces, the administration console and the JSON API are all served by one application. The database and the mail transport are bound to loopback only, so the management surfaces are never exposed to the network while the web application serves your program committee and authors.

Secure by default: no default, shared or blank credentials ship in the image. There is no administrator account and no database configuration in the image at all. On the first boot of your instance a one shot service generates a unique administrator password and a unique database password, creates the conference database and loads the schema, writes the configuration, creates the single system administrator account with a bcrypt password, and then proves the new credentials work by signing in through the real sign-in form before it completes. Because HotCRP grants administrator rights to the first account created on a fresh site, the web application is held behind a bootstrap gate until that administrator has been seeded - so no visitor can ever register themselves as the first administrator.

Key capabilities: online paper submission with author registration and conflict declaration; program committee bidding, automatic and manual reviewer assignment, and reviewer preference handling; structured review forms with numeric scores and text fields; anonymous, double blind and open review modes; author response periods; tag and search based paper organisation; discussion and decision workflows for the chairs; bulk email to authors and reviewers; and a full JSON API and command line tools for automation.

Get started: read the per instance administrator password from the root only credentials file, browse to the instance address, sign in, change that password, set your conference name and submission deadlines, and invite your program committee. Point HotCRP's outgoing mail at your own SMTP relay when you are ready to send email to the outside world. cloudimg engineers can help with conference setup, reviewer assignment and mail configuration after purchase.

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