frab is a web-based conference planning and management system. It helps to collect submissions, to manage talks and speakers and to create a schedule.
frab was originally created for the organization of FrOSCon 2011. FrOSCon has previously used pentabarf (http://pentabarf.org), and although frab is a completely new implementation, it borrows heavily from pentabarf.
Both FrOSCon and frab owe a lot to pentabarf. But sadly, pentabarf seems to be abandoned. And several problems make it hard to maintain. Thus we decided to create a new system.
frab is under heavy development. There is no stable release yet. You may want to try to use frab regardless, but be warned, that it may be a rocky ride.
That being said, frab has been used to organize FrOSCon since 2011, a conference with more than 100 talks (and as many speakers) in more than 5 parallel tracks (plus devrooms) over 2 days.
The frab wiki hosts a list of conferences using frab.
frab is a pretty standard Ruby on Rails (version 4.2) application. There should be plenty of tutorials online on how to install, deploy and setup these.
Basically, to get started you need git, ruby (>= 2.1) and bundler and follow these steps:
- Install nodejs:
frab needs a javascript runtime. You should use nodejs, as it is easier to install than v8.
apt-get install nodejs
- Install Imagemagick:
This is a dependency of the paperclip gem. Imagemagick tools need to be installed to identify and resize images.
Imagemagick should be easy to install using your OS's preferred package manager (apt-get, yum, brew etc.).
-
Clone the repository
git clone git://github.com/frab/frab.git
-
cd into the directory:
cd frab
-
Modify settings:
Settings are defined via environment variables. frab uses dotenv files to
set these variables. The variables for development mode are set in .env.development.
You can also use .env.local for local overrides.
-
Run setup
bin/setup
-
Start the server
To start frab in the development environment simply run
rails server
Navigate to http://localhost:3000/ and login as "[email protected]" with password "test123".
- Installing database drivers
Instead of running bin/setup you need to run bundle install manually, so
you can choose your database gems. To avoid installing database drivers you don't
want to use, exclude drivers with
bundle install --without="postgresql mysql"
-
Create (and possibly modify) the database configuration:
cp config/database.yml.template config/database.yml
-
Configuration
In Production make sure the config variables are set, copy and edit the file
env.example to .env.production.
-
Precompile assets
rake assets:precompile
-
Security considerations
If you are running frab in a production environment you have to take additional steps to build a secure and stable site.
- Change the password of the inital admin account
- Change the initial secret token
- Add a content disposition header, so attachments get downloaded and
are not displayed in the browser. See
./public/system/attachments/.htaccessfor an example. - Add a gem like
exception_notificationto get emails in case of errors.
- Start the server
To start frab in the production environment run
RACK_ENV=production bundle rails s
frab supports OTRS and RT ticket servers. Instead of sending event acceptance/rejection mails directly to submitters, frab adds a ticket to a request tracker.
The ticket server type can be configured for every conference.
The iPHoneHandle support needs to be installed in OTRS.
Creates a folder under tmp/frab_export containing serialized data and all attachments:
RAILS_ENV=production CONFERENCE=acronym rake frab:conference_export
Import a conference into another frab:
RAILS_ENV=production rake frab:conference_import
RAILS_ENV=production rake frab:bulk_mailer subject="Conference Invite" [email protected] emails=emails.lst body=body.txt.erb
frab comes with a script that offers limited capabilities of migrating data from pentabarf. For it to work, you need access to pentabarf's database and configure it in config/database.yml under the key "pentabarf".
Then simply run
rake pentabarf:import:all
Please note, that the script has not been tested with HEAD and will most probably not work. If you still want to try it out, checkout the code at the revision the script was last changed at and upgrade the code and migrate the database from there.
frab can more easily be tested by using vagrant with chef recipes taking care of the installation process. More information can be found in these github projects:
For updates and discussions around frab, please join our mailinglist
frab (at) librelist.com - to subscribe just send a mail to it
frab is licensed under an MIT-License. It bundles some third-party libraries and assets that might be licensed differently. See LICENSE.