Manual installation on Linux

System requirements

At least 1GB of RAM
Distributions with Kernel >= 4.15
ARM64 or AMD64 architecture
An active internet connection during installation.
An active internet connection for at least 2 hours per day to allow license check (for the STARTUP & PRO Edition only).

Installing

To install CTFreak as a service, we will rely on systemd which is present on most distributions.

Copy latest ctfreak binary to /usr/local/bin and make the file executable:

sudo curl https://ctfreak.com/download/release/latest/linux/amd64 --output /usr/local/bin/ctfreak
# OR "sudo curl https://ctfreak.com/download/release/latest/linux/arm64 --output /usr/local/bin/ctfreak" for ARM64 architecture
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/ctfreak

Create systemd service file:

sudo touch /etc/systemd/system/ctfreak.service
sudo chmod 664 /etc/systemd/system/ctfreak.service

Create/Choose a user account to run CTFreak, we’ll call it myuser for now

Edit /etc/systemd/system/ctfreak.service (replace myuser with your real user):

[Unit]
Description=Run CtFreak server
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/ctfreak run
User=myuser
Group=myuser
LimitNOFILE=100000
LimitNOFILESoft=100000

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable & start CTFreak:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable ctfreak
sudo systemctl start ctfreak

Navigate to http://localhost:6700.

To complete this installation, we encourage you to configure a reverse proxy.

Uninstall

Execute:

sudo systemctl stop ctfreak
sudo systemctl disable ctfreak
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo rm /etc/systemd/system/ctfreak.service
sudo rm /usr/local/bin/ctfreak

Upgrading

Update /usr/local/bin/ctfreak with new binary and restart the service:

sudo curl https://ctfreak.com/download/release/latest/linux/amd64 --output /usr/local/bin/ctfreak
# OR "sudo curl https://ctfreak.com/download/release/latest/linux/arm64 --output /usr/local/bin/ctfreak" for ARM64 architecture
sudo systemctl restart ctfreak