Podium

Open source hackathon management. Registration, teams, submissions, judging, results — self-hosted, so your event's data stays yours.

Built and maintained by the CherryPick open source club.

What makes it different

Most hackathon platforms split judges across separate sets of projects and then rank by raw average. Those averages are not comparable: a team judged by strict judges loses to an equal team judged by generous ones. Podium has every judge score a small shared anchor set, estimates each judge's bias from it, and ranks on normalized scores — showing organizers both the raw and adjusted rankings so they can see what changed and why.

It also returns written feedback to every team, not just the winners.

Setup

Requires Node (see .nvmrc) and Docker.

git clone https://github.com/<org>/podium.git
cd podium
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d db      # Postgres on :5432
npm install
npx prisma migrate dev
npm run seed                 # a full fake event: teams, judges, part-scored
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000. The seed output prints login details for a sample organizer, participant, and judge.

Signing in locally

Seeded accounts use @podium.test addresses, which have no mailbox, so neither GitHub nor a magic link can reach them. In development the sign-in page offers a third option, Seeded user (development only): type any seeded address and you are signed in as that user. No password, no email. The seed prints one address for each role.

This provider is registered only when NODE_ENV !== "production". It is not a config flag and not an environment variable — next build folds the condition away and drops the provider from the bundle, so a production build has no password-less sign-in to turn on.

One consequence: a credentials sign-in always issues a JWT cookie, which a database session cannot read back, so development runs on JWT sessions while production keeps database sessions. If you are testing anything that touches the Session table, test it against a production build.

To sign in the way production does:

• GitHub — create an OAuth app (callback http://localhost:3000/api/auth/callback/github), set GITHUB_ID and GITHUB_SECRET, then sign in with your own GitHub account and give that user the role you want in the database.
• Email — set RESEND_API_KEY, and change the seeded addresses in prisma/seed-fixtures.ts to mailboxes you can actually read.

If setup takes more than ten minutes, that is a bug — please open an issue.

Docs

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — where code lives and why
• docs/DATA_MODEL.md — what the tables mean
• docs/GLOSSARY.md — the vocabulary, use these words
• docs/SCOPE.md — what v1 is, and what it is not
• docs/DECISIONS.md — why things are the way they are
• docs/SELF_HOSTING.md — running it for your own event

Contributing

New contributors welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md and the good first issue label. We aim to respond to every PR within 48 hours.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.