Until recently, we admitted new users to an instance of formr hosted at the University of Goettingen. This instance is now at capacity. We now recommend self-hosting, ideally using a professional web hoster.
formr can run on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. In its dockerized form, differences between platform should not cause problems. However, OpenCPU in production requires a Linux host (for AppArmor to work).
To install formr locally, either to test it out, or to contribute to development, we recommend using a dockerized version, which helpfully includes a docker compose environment for the database and OpenCPU too. You can find detailed instructions here: https://github.com/rubenarslan/formr_dev_docker
If you want to run formr in production, you have to be aware of multiple best practices.
Pain points include:
- formr, via OpenCPU, allows study creators to run arbitrary R code, so
- OpenCPU needs to be secured via AppArmor
- Access to running and viewing code run on OpenCPU needs to be restricted
- OpenCPU freezes R packages at each release, installing additional packages needs to be done with care, so as not to lead to version conflicts
- Research data should be encrypted at rest
- Subdomains per study are part of formr's security concept (separation of concerns, avoid cross-site scripting)
- Only encrypted connections to formr and OpenCPU should be possible
- Daemons for email sending and study progress need to be running continuously
The developers of formr (Ruben and Cyril) are available for consulting to make a standardized, dockerized production version of formr available. As the number of users has grown, we can no longer offer free support to everybody who installs formr in a non-standard way.
These are the instructions to run a local or online copy of the formr.org distribution. It is much easier to install the R package if that's what you're looking for.