https://github.com/ctfer-io/chall-manager
Challenge Scenarios on Demand, anywhere, anytime, of any size, and for anyone
https://github.com/ctfer-io/chall-manager
capture-the-flag ctf on-demand
Last synced: about 1 month ago
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Challenge Scenarios on Demand, anywhere, anytime, of any size, and for anyone
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/ctfer-io/chall-manager
- Owner: ctfer-io
- License: apache-2.0
- Created: 2024-01-25T13:35:20.000Z (over 1 year ago)
- Default Branch: main
- Last Pushed: 2024-12-29T11:27:57.000Z (10 months ago)
- Last Synced: 2024-12-29T12:19:46.346Z (10 months ago)
- Topics: capture-the-flag, ctf, on-demand
- Language: Go
- Homepage: https://ctfer.io/docs/chall-manager
- Size: 43.4 MB
- Stars: 2
- Watchers: 0
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 3
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- License: LICENSE
- Code of conduct: CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
- Security: SECURITY.md
Awesome Lists containing this project
README
Chall-Manager
Finally, a proper solution for Challenges on Demand
Chall-Manager is a challenge instances on demand engine, designed to make managing CTF (Capture The Flag) challenges effortless.
Instead of juggling infrastructure details, container lifecycles, and scaling logic, Chall-Manager provides a unified abstraction layer to run and manage challenges reliably—whether for a classroom, training environment, or large-scale competition.
> [!CAUTION]
> Chall-Manager is currently in public beta phase.
> It could be run in production, but breaking changes are subject to happen in the upcoming months until General Availability.
## 🚀 What Chall-Manager Does
- **Abstracts infrastructure** – Run challenges locally, in Kubernetes, or across clouds without changing your workflows;
- **Manages challenge lifecycles** – Create, start, stop, and clean up instances on demand;
- **Scales intelligently** – Define minimum/maximum pool sizes, then automatically maintains the pool; pick from the pool whenever needed;
- **[Integrates with CTFd](https://github.com/ctfer-io/ctfd-chall-manager) and more** – Is platform-agnostic, and has [Terraform](https://github.com/ctfer-io/terraform-provider-ctfdcm) and [Pulumi](https://github.com/ctfer-io/pulumi-ctfdcm) integrations for [CTFd](https://github.com/ctfd/ctfd);
- **Provides a [SDK](/sdk)** – Build or reuse previous work, with the best trade-offs between capabilities, security by design and by default, and costs.
Whether you're running a single practice challenge or hundreds of dynamic containers, Chall-Manager takes care of the heavy lifting so you can focus on content and players.
## 🧩 Why Use Chall-Manager?
- **For Educators & Trainers** – Run reproducible lab environments for students without dealing with manual resets;
- **For CTF Organizers** – Handle thousands of ephemeral challenge instances with minimal ops overhead;
- **For Researchers & Developers** – Use the abstraction layer to prototype new challenge backends or integrations.
Chall-Manager turns complex infrastructure problems into simple challenge management.
## 📦 Installation
As a generic solution, many alternatives exist regarding deployment: please have a look [here](https://ctfer.io/docs/chall-manager/ops-guides/deployment/).
## ⚡ Quick Start
Let's spin a quick Docker infra, then deploy one example !
```bash
# Start the infra
docker network create quickstart || true
docker run -d --network quickstart --name registry -p 5000:5000 registry:3
docker run -d --network quickstart --name chall-manager -p 8080:8080 ctferio/chall-manager:latest --oci.insecure
# Compile chall-manager-cli
# go build -o chall-manager-cli cmd/chall-manager-cli/main.go
# mv chall-manager-cli "$(go env GOPATH)/bin/"
#
# Alternatively you could install it using
# go install github.com/ctfer-io/chall-manager/cmd/chall-manager-cli@latest
#
# Or you can execute it on the fly using "go run cmd/chall-manager-cli/main.go"
# instead of "chall-manager-cli" in the next steps.
# Create a challenge
chall-manager-cli --url localhost:8080 challenge create \
--id test \
--scenario registry:5000/your-org/your-scenario:v0.1.0 \
--dir examples/additional \
--insecure
# Then create an instance
chall-manager-cli --url localhost:8080 instance create \
--challenge_id test \
--source_id test
# Optional: wipe out all Docker setup
docker stop registry chall-manager
docker rm registry chall-manager
docker network rm quickstart
```
This example does not actually deploy resources, you'll have to provide Chall-Manager additional capabilities to do so !
Look at the [tutorials](https://ctfer.io/docs/chall-manager/tutorials/) for what fits your use case.
## 🏆 Trophy list
The following list contains all known events were Chall-Manager has been operated in production (YYYY/MM/DD):
- 2024/11/20 [NoBracketsCTF 2024](https://github.com/nobrackets-ctf/NoBrackets-2024)
- 2025/02/09 [ICAISC 2025](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7295762712364544001/?actorCompanyId=103798607)
- 2025/03/08 Hack'lantique 2025
- 2025/05/17 [WhiteHats TrojanCTF 2025](https://github.com/ESHA-Trojan/TrojanCTF-2025-public)
- 2025/05/24 [24h IUT 2025](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7332827877123506177/)
Please [open an issue](https://github.com/ctfer-io/chall-manager/issues/new) to add your event to the list if we did not ourself.
## 🔨 Development setup
Once you clonned the repository, run the following commands to make sure you have all the generated files on your local system and up to date.
```bash
make buf
make update-swagger
```
You could also run those before a commit that affects the `*.proto` files to avoid inconsistencies between your local setup and the distant branch.
If you need to run a local etcd instance, you could use the following.
```bash
docker run -v /usr/share/ca-certificates/:/etc/ssl/certs -p 4001:4001 -p 2380:2380 -p 2379:2379 -e ETCD_ROOT_PASSWORD=root bitnami/etcd:3.5.13
```