Auto CTFd

Automatically deploy your CTF challenges from GitHub to CTFd. Also supports containerised challenges on managed CTFd, Kubernetes, and Microsoft Azure.

Requirements

• A managed or self-hosted CTFd instance
  • An education discount is available for managed instances. Contact support for more details.
• GitHub account for each challenge author. Consider GitHub Education if you're eligible

Getting Started

1. Click here to create a repository for your CTF. Select "Private" to prevent public access
2. Allow GitHub Actions to create pull requests
3. Create the following secrets:

Name	Value
CTFD_TOKEN	CTFd admin access token
CTFD_SITE_PASSWORD (optional)	CTFd site password, if enabled

4. Create the following variables:

Name	Value
CTFD_DOMAIN	CTFd domain, eg example.ctfd.io
FLAG_PREFIX (optional)	Flag prefix for linting, eg ctf{

5. See containers for more options

Usage

• Invite your team members to access the repo
• Create GitHub issues for each challenge. Send a link like this to your challenge authors: [your-repo-url]/issues/new/choose
• Consider using GitHub Codespaces for challenge development
• Add CTFd pages to the pages folder, and they'll automatically be deployed

Updating

Get the latest updates with the following commands. You may need to resolve merge conflicts.

git pull https://github.com/pl4nty/auto-CTFd --allow-unrelated-histories --rebase=false --squash -X theirs
git commit -m "chore: update repo template"
git push

Containers

Some challenges, like pwn or web, may need to run services in containers. These can be deployed to several platforms. To disable a platform, disable its GitHub workflow.

Managed CTFd

Note that managed CTFd has certain Dockerfile requirements and limitations. Please see the CTFd documentation for more details.

Create the following variables:

Name	Value
REGISTRY	Managed CTFd registry, eg registry.ctfd.io/example

Kubernetes

1. Add a Compose file like docker-compose.yml to each of your challenge(s)
2. Ensure TCP challenges have unique ports
3. Create the following variables:

Name	Value
REGISTRY	A container registry accessible by the Kubernetes cluster
KUBE_HOST	Hostname for challenges. HTTP challenges will be available via ingress on example.KUBE_HOST, and TCP challenges via load balancer service on KUBE_HOST:port

4. Create the following secrets:

Name	Value
REGISTRY_USERNAME	Container registry username
REGISTRY_PASSWORD	Container registry password
KUBE_CONFIG	A static kubeconfig file. To use a dynamic file instead, modify the workflow to retrieve its own kubeconfig eg using azure/aks-set-context

5. Deploy the challenges
6. Create an ingress controller in the cluster
7. Create a public DNS record for *.KUBE_HOST to the controller's IP address
8. Create a public DNS record for KUBE_HOST to the load balancer IP address

Microsoft Azure

1. Create an Azure app registration and federated credentials
2. Create an Azure Container Apps environment. Note that a custom vnet is required for TCP ports.
3. Delete the quickstart Container App, and assign the Contributor role on its resource group to the app registration
4. Create a user-assigned managed identity and
5. Create an Azure Container Registry and assign the AcrPull role on it to the managed identity
6. (Optional) Add a custom DNS suffix to the Container Apps environment
7. Create the following variables:

Name	Value
REGISTRY	A container registry accessible by the Container Apps environment
AZURE_TENANT_ID	App registration tenant ID
AZURE_CLIENT_ID	App registration client ID
AZURE_CONTAINER_ENV	Container Apps enviroment resource ID
AZURE_CONTAINER_IDENTITY	Managed identity resource ID
AZURE_CONTAINER_SUFFIX	Container Apps environment DNS suffix, eg chals.example.com