Manual installation on Windows

System requirements

At least 4GB of RAM
Windows 10 and above
AMD64 architecture
CTFreak configuration folder must not be located on a network drive
An active internet connection during installation
An active internet connection for at least 2 hours per day to allow license check (only required for the STARTUP & PRO Edition)

Installing

To install CTFreak as a service, we will rely on sc command.

Copy downloaded ctfreak.exe binary to C:\ctfreak\ctfreak.exe.

Execute (as an administrator):

sc.exe create "CTFreak" binpath= "C:\ctfreak\ctfreak.exe run" start= auto displayname= "CTFreak"
sc.exe start "CTFreak"

2 important notes:

As long as you have downloaded the executable from this site, you can ignore the warning message that the executable is unsigned.
Windows Defender antivirus has a nasty tendency to produce false positives with programs compiled in the Go language (which is the case with CTFreak). If Windows Defender blocks the execution of ctfreak.exe (and showed it had virus like Trojan:Script/Wacatac), add an exception to allow its execution.

At startup, CTFreak will create its dedicated config folder %LocalAppData%\ctfreak to store its configuration file, embedded database and log files (usually C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\ctfreak).

Navigate to http://localhost:6700.

To complete this installation, we encourage you to configure a reverse proxy and update the global settings.

Upgrading

Execute:

sc.exe stop "CTFreak"

Copy new downloaded ctfreak.exe binary to C:\ctfreak\ctfreak.exe.

Execute:

sc.exe start "CTFreak"

Uninstall

Execute:

sc.exe stop "CTFreak"
sc.exe delete "CTFreak"

Delete C:\ctfreak folder.