Setting up CTFd

I was recently tasked with setting up a ctf environment and I have been researching ever since. After looking through other platforms such as rctf and fbctf, I settled on CTFD. CTFd is a Capture The Flag (CTF) framework designed for ease of use for both administrators and users. Not only is CTFd full featured, but it's open source, written in the simple Flask framework, and easy to modify. So lets get into it!

Prerequisites

(There isn't many tbh)

VPS (with your prefered flavour of Linux)
Internet connection

I am still in the testing stages of this platform. Therefore, I will be not be deploying this on a live production server. I will be working on a virtual machine instead. I will be using a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04 on VMware Workstation Pro.

Install Docker & Docker Compose

The first thing we need to ensure that we have is docker and docker compose! This step is very crucial as we are going to be running our webserver on a docker container. You can take a look at this post of mine to install both of these :) !

TLDR; Here are the install commands

root@ubuntu:~# sudo apt install docker.io docker-compose

Before we move on lets check if the installation was successful

root@ubuntu:~# docker --version

root@ubuntu:~# docker-compose --version

Setting up CTFd

Clone the CTFd repository

Now that we have docker and docker compose installed, its time to clone CTFd's github repository onto our local machine.

root@ubuntu:/ctfd# git clone github.com/CTFd/CTFd.git

Setting up CTFd

Build CTFd docker container

Following the git clone, we are now ready to build the docker image. All you have to do is enter 1 command.

root@ubuntu:/#cd /CTFd root@ubuntu:/CTFd# docker-compose up

Setting up CTFd

Now we wait for it to finish building!

Setting up CTFd

Once we see something like this, we are DONE!!

Setup the CTFd portal

Now that we are all setup we can access the server IP address on port 80 using any browser. We will be greeted with this page.

Setting up CTFd

Once we see this page, we are all set! We can go head and configure the portal to our liking and conduct our CTF event!

That was easier than I thought. I was kinda intimidated by the thought of setting up a CTF framework but it went pretty smooth! I hope to use this framework for the project that I am embarking on! Hope you learnt something too ♥!

~Nee