CTFCollab

Collaborative tool for CTF (capture the flag) teams to keep track of and collaborate on challenges during competitions.

Project Values

The goal of this project is to provide an open source, developer friendly, pickup and go solution to collaberative development while solving cybersecurity puzzles in CTF competitions.

• Pick up and go: Our website is meant to be as simple as possible. Users don’t need accounts, they just enter a PIN and get access to an instance similar to Kahoot.
• Open source: We value transparency and community. By choosing to make our software open source we are enabling others to contribute to and audit the code.
• Industry-Standard Tech Stack: Built with Go (backend), SvelteKit (frontend), and MySQL (database), our stack prioritizes performance, scalability, and developer familiarity.
• Developer-Friendly Codebase: We prioritize code organization and helpful comments to make the project accessible to new contributors.

Team Members and Roles

• Kevin Rossel: Resident CTF’er. Backend and database schema. Guided UI/UX
• Teo Liam Ippolito: UX Designer and Frontend Development Lead
• Brayden Aldrich: Frontend, backend, and API development
• Danny T Nguyen: Implemented frontend features
• Maximiliano Maldonado: Backend development, worked on the database, API and implementing frontend
• Sory Diagouraga: Backend development and API documentation.

Status

Development of CTFNote is ongoing. Use at your own risk.

Table of contents

• CTFCollab
• Project Values
• Team Members and Roles
  • Status
• Table of contents
  • Features
  • UI
  • Running in docker
  • Running for frontend development
  • Running locally
    • Just the frontend
    • Just the backend
  • Running the backend test suite

Features

• Self-hostable
• Live document editing
• Challenge tracking
• CTF tracking
• CTF member tracking
• Free and open source

UI

Running in docker

Create a .env file in the root directory of CTFCollab. Here is a template:

MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=CHANGE_ME
MYSQL_DATABASE=ctfcollab
MYSQL_USER=ctfuser
MYSQL_PASSWORD=CHANGE_ME
MYSQL_URL=${MYSQL_USER}:${MYSQL_PASSWORD}@tcp(db:3306)/${MYSQL_DATABASE}?multiStatements=true&parseTime=true
CMD_DB_URL=mysql://hedgedoc:hedgedoc_pass@db:3306/hedgedoc
CMD_DOMAIN=localhost:3001
HEDGEDOC_URL=http://hedgedoc:3000
CMD_PROTOCOL_USESSL=false
CMD_URL_ADDPORT=false
ADMIN_USERNAME=Admin
ADMIN_PASSWORD=CHANGE_ME
JWT_SECRET=CHANGE_ME

Starting

docker compose up --build

Stopping

docker compose down

Removing database

docker volume rm ctfcollab_db-data
# or, to remove the database while spinning the containers down
docker compose down -v

Running for frontend development

For frontend development, it helps to not run the frontend in docker so it auto updated with each change to the source code.

# Run just the backed in docker
docker compose -f compose.backend_only.yaml up --build

# Run the frontend outside of docker (make sure to do npm install)
npm run dev

Running locally

Just the frontend

If for whatever reason you want to run the frontend outside of docker, first run npm install (or pnpm install or yarn) in the repository directory. Then to run the frontend, use one of these commands:

npm run dev

# or start the server and open the app in a new browser tab
npm run dev -- --open

It is also recommended to get the svelte extension for vscode. If you use another editor there is likely a svelte extension/plugin for it.

To create a production version of the frontend:

npm run build

You can preview the production build with npm run preview.

Just the backend

Golang is required to compile and run the backend code on your computer

For working on the database schema, sqlc is required https://docs.sqlc.dev/en/stable/overview/install.html

Running code: go run . while in the backend directory

You can modify the queries and schema in backend/db/. Once you modify them, use sqlc generate to generate the corresponding go code. You will need to install sqlc to do so.

Also, we recommend using the mysql docker container to run the database locally

Running the backend test suite

To run the tests, make sure the backend is running, and then run the commands:

cd backend   
go test ./tests    

Sometimes the database can get messed up, in that case you can one of run the following commands:

# Spin down the backend and remove the database volume at the same time
docker compose down -v

# Remove the database volume
docker volume rm ctfcollab_db-data