CTFd/CTFd

CTFd/CTFd has 6,900 GitHub stars and 2,792 forks. GitHot measured +1 stars in 24 hours and +6 in 7 days. Last checked 2026-11-07 23:22 UTC. Last push 2026-11-01.

How these counts are measured

CTFs as you need them

6,900 stars 2,792 forks +1 in 24h

What you can do

Dynamic Scoring Challenges
Unlockable challenge support
Challenge plugin architecture to create your own custom challenges
Custom flag plugins

Measured star growth

in 24h: +1
in 7 days: +6
in 15 days: Collecting history
in 1 month: Collecting history

Net star changes over overlapping periods, not daily totals. Missing measurements are left blank. Stars measure attention, not software quality.

README.md

Original

What is CTFd?

CTFd is a Capture The Flag framework focusing on ease of use and customizability. It comes with everything you need to run a CTF and it's easy to customize with plugins and themes.

CTFd is a CTF in a can.

Features

Create your own challenges, categories, hints, and flags from the Admin Interface
- Dynamic Scoring Challenges
- Unlockable challenge support
- Challenge plugin architecture to create your own custom challenges
- Static & Regex based flags
  - Custom flag plugins
- Unlockable hints
- File uploads to the server or an Amazon S3-compatible backend
- Limit challenge attempts & hide challenges
- Automatic bruteforce protection
Individual and Team based competitions
- Have users play on their own or form teams to play together
Scoreboard with automatic tie resolution
- Hide Scores from the public
- Freeze Scores at a specific time
Scoregraphs comparing the top 10 teams and team progress graphs
Markdown content management system
SMTP + Mailgun email support
- Email confirmation support
- Forgot password support
Automatic competition starting and ending
Team management, hiding, and banning
Customize everything using the plugin and theme interfaces
Importing and Exporting of CTF data for archival
And a lot more...

Install

The easiest way to get started is to use a Hosted CTFd instance.

For self-hosted installations, check out the CTFd docs for deployment options and the Getting Started guide.

Below is a summary of a few options for self-hosting CTFd:

Docker

You can use Docker Compose with the following command from the source repository:

docker compose up

To use the auto-generated Docker images directly:

docker run -p 8000:8000 -it ctfd/ctfd

Development

Install uv and run uv sync to create a virtualenv with the dependencies installed.
- You can also install into an existing environment with pip install -r requirements.txt, which is generated from uv.lock.
Modify CTFd/config.ini to your liking.
Use uv run serve.py or uv run flask run in a terminal to drop into debug mode.

Live Demo

https://demo.ctfd.io/

Support

If you prefer commercial support or have a special project, feel free to contact us.

Managed Hosting

Looking to use CTFd but don't want to deal with managing infrastructure? Check out the CTFd website for managed CTFd deployments.

Credits

Logo by Laura Barbera
Theme by Christopher Thompson
Notification Sound by Terrence Martin