qnop — Qualified Notes on Papers

Document review your team actually wants to finish.

Try the live demo → Sign in as member, nora or paul (password Test-Pass-1234!) or take the read-only auditor view with auditor — 14 staged reviews with real annotated discussions await. All data resets every 12 hours.

qnop is a self-hosted, enterprise-grade document review system. Upload a document, invite reviewers — individual users or whole teams — and run a coordinated review: passages are marked up right in the browser, discussed in threads, accepted or rejected; changes produce new document versions, and the review is finalized once no open annotation remains. The goal: replace the e-mail-attachment-and-comment-spreadsheet workflow with one place where reviews are precise, accountable — and genuinely satisfying to complete.

qnop reviews PDF and Word (DOCX) documents today (DOCX is converted out-of-process via LibreOffice where installed); Markdown follows the same ingest pipeline later (ADR-0010, ADR-0032).

• Line-precise annotations. Mark exact lines and regions of a rendered PDF, comment in Markdown threads, react, and jump between document and discussion — annotations stay anchored to what they mean.
• A real review workflow. Open → discussed → accepted/rejected; new document versions re-anchor existing annotations instead of orphaning them, and a review can only be finalized when nothing is left open.
• Teams, roles & privacy. Global ADMIN / MEMBER / AUDITOR roles plus per-team leads; reviews can run with anonymized reviewer identities when the process demands it.
• Reviews as a sport. Streaks, scoreboards, achievements and player-card profiles turn review throughput into something visible — and finishing reviews into a habit, not a chore.
• Fully accountable. Every relevant action lands in the audit trail, inspectable by the dedicated auditor role.
• Enterprise sign-in. Local accounts with self-registration and e-mail verification, or OIDC single sign-on; JWT sessions with rotating refresh tokens and rate-limited auth endpoints.
• Yours to run. One container (REST API + embedded web UI), PostgreSQL, and any S3-compatible object storage. Your documents never leave your infrastructure. Tenant branding, SMTP and mail templates are configured at runtime in the admin area.

qnop is open-core: this repository is the AGPL-3.0 Community edition; commercial add-ons live in a separate private repository built against the published qnop-spi contract.

The dashboard: your two hats at a glance	Annotations as a task board

Every annotation is also a task: the board derives its columns from the discussion state, and dragging your own card to Resolved closes it. Profiles collect achievements as you review — finishing work is the whole point.

The released image is qnophq/qnop-ce on Docker Hub (multi-arch: amd64/arm64), mirrored to ghcr.io/qnophq/qnop-ce. qnop needs PostgreSQL and an S3-compatible object storage — the repository ships a single-host deploy/docker-compose.yml wiring all three:

curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qnophq/qnop/main/deploy/docker-compose.yml
QNOP_VERSION=latest \
QNOP_DB_PASSWORD="$(openssl rand -base64 24)" \
QNOP_S3_ACCESS_KEY=qnop \
QNOP_S3_SECRET_KEY="$(openssl rand -base64 24)" \
QNOP_AUTH_JWT_SECRET="$(openssl rand -base64 48)" \
QNOP_AUTH_ENCRYPTION_KEY="$(openssl rand -base64 48)" \
QNOP_AUTH_ENCRYPTION_SALT="$(openssl rand -hex 32)" \
docker compose up -d

The server fails fast when a required secret is missing or still a placeholder — there are no insecure defaults. In practice, keep the values in an env file outside version control.

First login: on first start qnop bootstraps the admin account and prints its one-time password to the container's stderr:

docker compose logs qnop | tail -5

Open http://localhost:8080, sign in, change the password.

The full environment contract, TLS/reverse-proxy guidance, backups and upgrade notes live in the deployment guide. Rolling development builds of main are published to GHCR only, as ghcr.io/qnophq/qnop-ce:main, for evaluation — production deployments pin a release version.

Requires JDK 21, Node 24 + pnpm, and Docker. Docker must be running for the backend test suite — tests boot real PostgreSQL and MinIO containers via Testcontainers (ADR-0020).

# Local infrastructure (Postgres for bootRun + MinIO)
cp .env.example .env && docker compose up -d

# Backend — compile + format check + architecture & context tests
./gradlew build

# Run the server (uses the docker-compose Postgres).
# Unlike `docker compose`, Gradle's bootRun does NOT auto-load .env, and the server
# fails fast unless QNOP_AUTH_JWT_SECRET / QNOP_AUTH_ENCRYPTION_KEY / QNOP_AUTH_ENCRYPTION_SALT
# hold real values. Replace the CHANGE_ME placeholders in .env, then export it:
set -a; source .env; set +a
./gradlew :qnop-app:bootRun

# Frontend
cd qnop-ui && pnpm install && pnpm dev

Architecture, module map, and stack: docs/ARCHITECTURE.md · decisions: docs/adr/

Issue → feature branch → PR; never commit to main. All changes are reviewed and CI-gated. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

GNU AGPL-3.0. The network-use copyleft applies: offering qnop over a network requires making the corresponding source available to its users.