This is a system for hosting task-based CTFs. It was first used for hosting School CTF by SiBears team in 2015 (http://school-ctf.org/) and is currently in clean-up mode.

This section describes the process of deploying BlackBox3 for devlopment purposes. The production setup steps are to be written later. The instructions given here are tested on Ubuntu 14.04. You may need to adjust them for your OS.

• python2.7
• python-pip
• git
• redis-server
• postgresql
• libpq-dev

TODO: complete the list of packages, including all the libraries.

You may use this command to install the packages:

$ sudo apt-get install python2.7 python-pip git redis-server postgresql libpq-dev ...

Optionally you may install these packages that are extremely useful for debugging and maintenance:

• redis-tools

TODO: add more packages here.

You need to obtain the latest code from the project repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/stefantsov/blackbox3.git
$ cd blackbox3

The recommended way to install the required python packages is using virtualenv utility that itself may be installed globally using pip package manager:

$ sudo pip install virtualenv

Now, create the virtual environment and install the packages:

$ virtualenv ../bb3-env
$ source ../bb3-env/bin/activate
(bb3-env)$ pip install -r requirements.txt

BlackBox3 uses some utilities from NodeJS, for example less and yuglify. One of the ways of obtaining those is described here.

First, download the archive that matches your OS from this page. Let's assume it is node-v4.1.2-linux-x64.tar.gz. Unpack the archive, and copy its contents to the virtual environment folder.

(bb3-env)$ wget -P /tmp/ https://nodejs.org/dist/v4.1.2/node-v4.1.2-linux-x64.tar.gz
(bb3-env)$ tar xvzf /tmp/node-v4.1.2-linux-x64.tar.gz -C /tmp
(bb3-env)$ rsync -a /tmp/node-v4.1.2-linux-x64/* ../bb3-env

You may check if these steps were successful by issuing the following command:

(bb3-env)$ which npm

It should print out the full path to the npm utility.

Now that the npm installation utility for NodeJS packages is available to you, install less and yuglify.

(bb3-env)$ npm install -g less yuglify

BlackBox3 uses multiple-file settings setup. The core settings are in settings/base.py file, and you aren't supposed to make changes there. Everything specific to your installation should go to settings/local.py file. To create one you may start with copying settings/local_example.py file to settings/local.py and making changes there.

(bb3-env)$ cp settings/local_example.py settings/local.py
(bb3-env)$ vim settings/local.py

Basically, you want to change the following:

• SECRET_KEY to any random string,
• entries in DATABASES dictionary (see further the instructions on database setup),
• EMAIL_HOST, EMAIL_HOST_USER, EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD, and EMAIL_USE_TLS if you plan to send emails, or EMAIL_BACKEND if you want to change the mailing behavior,
• uncomment WSGI_APPLICATION for development purposes.

If you have the PostgreSQL package installed, you may use the following to create the database user and the database for your BlackBox3 installation.

(bb3-env)$ sudo su - postgres
$ createuser -D -E -R -P -S blackbox3 # it will ask for a password
$ createdb -E utf8 -O blackbox3 blackbox3
$ exit

Now you can use blackbox3 as the value for NAME and USER fields in the DATABASES dictionary (see Step 5) and the entered password as the value of PASSWORD field. You may also need to change the value of HOST from 127.0.0.1 to localhost depending on your PostgreSQL settings.

If everything was setup properly, you may now initialize the database tables:

(bb3-env)$ python manage.py migrate

Finally, you want at least one Game object in your database. Here is how you create it.

(bb3-env)$ python manage.py shell_plus
...
>>> Game.objects.create()
>>> exit()

Everything is ready for the first launch of your BlackBox3 installation! For this you need two consoles: one is to run the Django project, and another is to run celery. Make sure your Redis is already running (it's true if you're using Ubuntu, and just installed redis-server package).

In the first console type this:

(bb3-env)$ python manage runserver

In the second console type this:

(bb3-env)$ celery -A slr1 worker -l info

If everything was ok, you may now access http://localhost:8000/ with your browser and see the brand new empty BlackBox3 page!

TODO: write about branching model, versioning, testing, etc.

Please, email d.a.stephantsov@gmail.com if you have any questions of suggestions.