opencfp

OpenCFP is a PHP-based conference talk submission system.
31 Mar 202052911

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OpenCFP is a PHP-based conference talk submission system.

YOU CAN SUPPORT THIS PROJECT BY SPONSORING CHRIS HARTJES VIA HIS GitHub Sponsorship


GitHub Actions GitHub release

README Contents

Features

  • Speaker registration system that gathers contact information.
  • Dashboard that allows speakers to submit talk proposals and manage their profile.
  • Administrative dashboard for reviewing submitted talks and making selections.
  • Command-line utilities for administering the system.

Screenshots

You can find screenshots of the application in our wiki

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Minimum Requirements

  • PHP 7.3 (currently does not work on PHP 7.4 due to dependency issues)
  • Apache 2+ with mod_rewrite enabled and an AllowOverride all directive in your <Directory> block is the recommended web server
  • Composer requirements are listed in composer.json.
  • You may need to install php7.0-intl extension for PHP. (php-intl on CentOS/RHEL-based distributions)
  • Either the GD image library or the Imagick PHP extension for the Intervention image library)

Privacy Restrictions

We request that anyone who installs OpenCFP to not share any of the personal information that is collected from users with any third parties without explicit permission from users and to also be aware of the existence of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation as it could potentially impact your ability to accept submissions from anyone residing within the European Union.

Tools to make it easier to comply with the GDPR are in the process of being created.

We recommend that you delete any data stored in a database associated with an OpenCFP instance within 15 months of accepting submissions from users.

Installation

Grab Latest Release

It is recommended for you to always install the latest marked release. Go to https://github.com/opencfp/opencfp/releases to download it.

Cloning the Repository

Clone this project into your working directory. We recommend always running the master branch as it was frequent contributions.

Example:

$ git clone git@github.com:opencfp/opencfp.git
Cloning into 'opencfp'...
remote: Counting objects: 4794, done.
remote: Total 4794 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (4794/4794), 1.59 MiB | 10.37 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (2314/2314), done.
Checking connectivity... done.

Specify Environment

OpenCFP can be configured to run in multiple environments. The application environment (CFP_ENV) must be specified as an environment variable. If not specified, the default is development.

An example Apache configuration is provided at /web/htaccess.dist. Copy this file to /web/.htaccess or otherwise configure your web server in the same way and change the CFP_ENV value to specify a different environment. The default has been pre-set for development.

SetEnv CFP_ENV production

You will also need to set the CFP_ENV variable in the shell you are using when doing an install. Here are some ways to do that with common shells assuming we're using production:

  • bash: export CFP_ENV=production
  • zsh: export CFP_ENV = production
  • fish: set -x CFP_ENV production

Again, just use your preferred environment in place of production if required.

Installing Composer Dependencies

From the project directory, run the following command. You may need to download composer.phar first from http://getcomposer.org

$ php composer.phar run setup-env

If you have composer installed globally you can run:

$ composer run setup-env

Or you can run

$ ./script/setup

Due to current dependencies you will see the following warning message when installing this project's dependencies via Composer:

Carbon 1 is deprecated, see how to migrate to Carbon 2.
https://carbon.nesbot.com/docs/#api-carbon-2
    You can run './vendor/bin/upgrade-carbon' to get help in updating carbon and other frameworks and libraries that depend on it.

Specify Web Server Document Root

Set up your desired webserver to point to the /web directory.

Apache 2+ Example:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /path/to/web
    ServerName cfp.conference.com

    # Other Directives Here
</VirtualHost>

nginx Example:

server {
	server_name cfp.sitename.com;
	root /var/www/opencfp/web;
	listen 80;
	index index.php index.html index.htm;

	access_log /var/log/nginx/access.cfp.log;
	error_log /var/log/nginx/error.cfp.log;

	location / {
		try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
	}

	location ~ \.php$ {
		try_files $uri =404;

		fastcgi_param CFP_ENV production;
		fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
		fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php71-fpm.sock;
		fastcgi_read_timeout 150;
		fastcgi_index index.php;
		fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
		include fastcgi_params;
	}

}

Running Locally

After having gone through the setup steps and database migrations, you can test out OpenCFP locally by installing the Symfony binary and using the following command:

symfony server:start

By default it should start up a web server running your site at https://127.0.0.1:8000

Create a Database

Create a new database for the application to use. You will need to have the following handy to continue configuring your installation of OpenCFP:

  • Database server hostname
  • Database name
  • Credentials to an account that can access the above database

Configure Environment

Depending on which environment you specified above, you will need to make a copy of the distributed configuration schema to enter your own details into.

For example, if you specified SetEnv CFP_ENV production:

$ cp config/production.yml.dist config/production.yml

After making a local copy, edit config/production.yml and specify your own details. Here are some important options to consider:

Option Description
application.enddate This is the date your call for proposals would end on.
application.coc_link Set this to the link for your conference code of conduct to require speakers to agree to the code of conduct at registration
secure_ssl This should be enabled, if possible. Requires a valid SSL certificate.
database.* This is the database information you collected above.
mail.* This is SMTP configuration for sending mail. The application sends notifications on various system events.
opencfpcentral.* Settings related to using OpenCFP Central for single-sign-on
talk.categories.* dbkey: Display Name mapping for your talk categories
talk.types.* dbkey: Display Name mapping for your talk types
talk.levels.* dbkey: Display Name mapping for your talk levels

For example, if you wanted to setup Mailgun as your email provider, your mail configuration would look something like this:

mail:
    host: smtp.mailgun.org
    port: 587
    username: do-not-reply@cfp.myfancyconference.com
    password: "a1b2c3d4"
    encryption: tls
    auth_mode: ~

As the project migrates from using Eloquent to Doctrine you also need to edit the following files to ensure the database credentials are correct, creating a version of the modified file in the same location but without the .dist suffix.

resources/config/config_testing.yml.dist resources/config/config_development.yml.dist resources/config/config_production.yml.dist

Running behind a trusted proxy

If you are running OpenCFP behind a proxy server which adds X-Forwarded-For headers (this could be a cloud based load balancer or a service such as Cloudflare) you will need to set the environment variable TRUST_PROXIES to true this will ensure that OpenCFP trusts the headers set by these proxies for the original IP address and ssl mode. Setting this will trust these headers regardless of where the original request originates, so it's advisable to either lock down your instance so that only the trusted proxy can access it or modify the list of trusted proxies in the index.php file to only include the ip addresses of your proxies.

OpenCFP Central

OpenCFP Central is a web site created by Chris Hartjes to help both speakers and conference organizers. Conference organizers can create an account and get an OAuth2 client ID and client secret, which can be entered into the configuration files. With the ID and secret, change the values for opencfpcentral.sso to be on, and set opencfpcentral.clientId and opencfpcentral.clientSecret to their respective values.

Any users who create an account at OpenCFP Central can use it to log into any OpenCFP instance that has enabled SSO. If you don't already have an account on that instance, one will be created for you.

Run Migrations

This project uses Doctrine Migrations to handle migrations.

To run the existing migrations, make sure you are in the root directory for the project and run the following:

$ bin/console doctrine:migrations:migrate --env=<environment> 

where is one of testing, development, or production. The default environment is development

Using Vagrant

After running $ composer run setup-env (or $ ./script/setup) from the project root run php vendor/bin/homestead make. This will create a Homestead.yaml based on settings from Homestead.yaml.example. Do not version control Homestead.yaml

Run vagrant up Add 192.168.10.10 opencfp.test to your operating system's hosts file (/etc/hosts) Point your browser to http://opencfp.test

Edit your config/development.yml to use Homestead's database & mail settings:

database:
  host: 127.0.0.1
  database: cfp
  dsn: mysql:dbname=cfp;host=127.0.0.1
  user: homestead
  password: secret

log:
  level: debug

mail:
  host: localhost
  port: 1025
  username: ~
  password: ~
  encryption: ~
  auth_mode: ~

Mailhog (local mail catching) can be viewed at http://opencfp.test:8025

For more usage information please see the Laravel Homestead Docs

You also need to edit the following files for Doctrine support

Final Touches

  • The web server must be able to write to the directories:
    • /web/uploads
    • /cache/:environment (e.g. /cache/production)
    • /log
  • You may need to alter the memory_limit of the web server to allow image processing of head-shots. This is largely dictated by the size of the images people upload. Typically 512M works.
  • Customize templates and /web/assets/css/app.css to your heart's content.

Building Docker Image

What is Docker

Quoting OpenSource:

"Docker is a tool designed to make it easier to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers. Containers allow a developer to package up an application with all of the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all out as one package. By doing so, thanks to the container, the developer can rest assured that the application will run on any other Linux machine regardless of any customized settings that machine might have that could differ from the machine used for writing and testing the code."

Requirements

  1. You will need to download and install Docker locally.
  2. You will need to download and install docker-compose too.

Build & Run the image

Please remember to edit the file config/docker.yml.dist to match your environment, then you can build your own docker image by using a docker-compose command which will build the image and run the containers automatically for you:

$  docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml.dist up --build -d

So now if you head over to http://localhost:8080 you will be greeted with a running version of OpenCFP in development mode.

After building and running the Docker image you'll need to use the docker-compose exec command to configure things inside the container:

$ docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml.dist exec app composer run setup-docker

and then Add an Admin User before logging-in.

Run PHP commands within the Container

To run any command in the app container you can use the docker-compose exec command, for example to clear the cache for your environment:

$ docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml.dist exec app bin/console cache:clear 

OR

Running the image directly

You can run the image (after you build it) and link it to an already running database container using the docker run command like:

docker run -e CFP_ENV=production -e CFP_DB_HOST=database -e CFP_DB_PASS=root --name cfp --link database:database -p 80:80 -d opencfp/opencfp:latest

Where database is the name of the running database container.

Access MySQL container

To access the MySQL container from outside the application container you can use the following information:

  • Host: 127.0.0.1
  • User: root
  • Password: root (or the one you specified in docker-compose)

For using docker in your development environment check DOCKER.md file.

PS: You can always modify the file docker-compose.yml.dist and have your own setup.

Command-line Utilities

OpenCFP comes bundled with a few command-line utilities to administer the system. A full list of commands (along with help for each) can be found by running the following in the project root:

$ bin/console

Admin Group Management

Administrators are authorized to review speaker information in addition to specifying talk favorites and making selections.

Adding speaker@opencfp.org to the admin group:

$ bin/console user:promote --env=production speaker@opencfp.org admin

Removing speaker@opencfp.org from the admin group:

$ bin/console user:demote --env=production speaker@opencfp.org admin

Reviewer Group Management

Reviewers are authorized to see talks and give ratings to them.

Adding speaker@opencfp.org to the reviewer group:

$ bin/console user:promote --env=production speaker@opencfp.org reviewer

Removing speaker@opencfp.org from the reviewer group:

$ bin/console user:demote --env=production speaker@opencfp.org reviewer

User Management

Users are needed for you system, and sometimes you want to add users via command line.

Adding a speaker:

$ bin/console user:create --first_name="Speaker" --last_name="Name" --email="speaker@opencfp.org" --password="somePassw0rd!"

Add an admin:

$ bin/console user:create --first_name="Admin" --last_name="Name" --email="admin@opencfp.org" --password="somePassw0rd!" --admin

Add a reviewer:

$ bin/console user:create --first_name="Admin" --last_name="Name" --email="admin@opencfp.org" --password="somePassw0rd!" --reviewer

Clear Caches

OpenCFP uses Twig as a templating engine and HTML Purifier for input filtering. Both of these packages maintain a cache. If you need to clear all application caches:

$ bin/console cache:clear

Scripts to Rule Them All

OpenCFP follows the Scripts to Rule Them All pattern. This allows for an easy to follow convention for common tasks when developing applications.

Initial Setup

This command will install all dependencies, run database migrations, and alert you of any missing configs.

$ composer run setup-env

Update Application

This command will update all dependencies and run new migrations

$ composer run update-env

Run Tests

This command will run the PHPUnit test suite using distributed phpunit config, phpunit.xml.dist, if no phpunit.xml is found in the root.

$ composer run test

Compiling Frontend Assets

OpenCFP ships with a pre-compiled CSS file. However, we now include the Sass / PostCSS used to compile front-end assets. You are free to modify these source files to change brand colors or modify your instance however you see fit. Remember, you can do nothing and take advantage of the pre-compiled CSS we ship. You only need these instructions if you want to customize or contribute to the look and feel of OpenCFP. Let's take a look at this new workflow for OpenCFP.

Install Node dependencies using yarn.

yarn install

Now dependencies are installed and we're ready to compile assets. Check out the scripts section of package.json. A normal development workflow is to run either yarn run watch or yarn run watch-poll (for OS that don't have fs-events) and begin work. When you make changes to Sass files, Webpack will recompile assets, but it doesn't compress the output. To do that, run yarn run prod (an alias for yarn run production). This will run the same compilation, but will compress the output.

The main app.scss file is at resources/assets/sass/app.scss. We use Laravel Mix to compile our Sass. Mix is configurable to run without Laravel, so we take advantage of that because it really makes dealing with Webpack a lot simpler. Our Mix configuration is at webpack.mix.js. In it, we run our app.scss through a Sass compilation step, we copy FontAwesome icons and finally run the compiled CSS through Tailwind CSS, a PostCSS plugin.

TailwindCSS is a new utility-first CSS framework that uses CSS class composition to piece together interfaces. Check out their documentation for more information on how to use the framework. We use it extensively across OpenCFP and it saves a lot of time and keeps us from having to maintain too much CSS. If you take a look through our app.scss, you'll see a lot of calls to @apply. This is NOT a Sass construct. It's a TailwindCSS function used to mixin existing classes into our custom CSS.

Testing

There is a test suite that uses PHPUnit in the /tests directory. To set up your environment for testing:

  1. Create a testing database, and update the name and credentials in /config/testing.yml
  2. The recommended way to run the tests is:
$ composer run test

The default phpunit.xml.dist file is in the root directory for the project.

Troubleshooting

I'm getting weird permissions-related errors to do with HTML Purifier.

You may need to edit directory permissions for some vendor packages such as HTML Purifier. Check the /cache directory's permissions first.