Note: CTFNote have been updated substantially, this tutorial will 

 branch on my forked repo. I will be creating a new tutorial for the latest version soon.

Collaborating on a CTF competition isn’t really easy, especially if your team is operating remotely in a different timezone. Managing files and assignment of challenges can get hectic.

My team and I used to collaborate on Discord, and we realised that when we wanted to see the challenges we solved, we would realised that we didn’t record down information on how to solve it. Thus, losing the steps on how to solve the challenge.

, a collaborative tool aiming to help CTF teams to organise their work. This tool was developed by 

. My reason for picking Heroku is because it is 

Heroku is a cloud platform as a service supporting several programming languages. One of the first cloud platforms, Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now supports Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go. - 

We can try out the application on our local machine before hosting it on Heroku. Installing it is simple, we can follow the instruction in the CTFNOTE GitHub 

Once we deploy the application, we can visit 127.0.0.1 and create our first account, which will automatically be provided with admin privileges.

According to the docker-compose.yml file, the application consist of 4 services. The backend (api), database (db), frontend (front), & hedgedoc. This will affect how we host it on Heroku later on.

As mentioned, CTFNote consist of 4 different services, this will affect how we host it on Heroku. Note: 

. Clone the this forked branch before following the steps below.

As a new user of Heroku, I would later find out that for a Free Tier user, a single “app” would only allow you to use a single web/worker dyno. A dyno is the heart of the Heroku platform and only a web dynos receive can receive HTTP traffics. You can read more about it 

This would mean that we will need to create 4 Heroku “apps”. However, lucky for us, we actually only need to create 3 Heroku “apps” as Hedgedoc has an official installation method on Heroku that combines the Postgres database and the Hedgedoc app together.

Before you begin, it is assumed that you have created a Heroku account and have setup the Heroku CLI tool. If you have not done that, you should do it before following the steps below.

To deploy the Hedgedoc app, just click on the link and make sure to set the correct config vars as listed below. The CMD_IMAGE_UPLOAD_TYPE & PGSSLMODE config vars can be added later.

Once it has been deployed, open the Heroku Postgres add-on page and copy the Database Credentials URI down somewhere as we will need it later for the backend app.

Before deploying the backend application to Heroku, you have to change some parts of the code for it to work with Heroku.

https://<your-Hedgedoc-app-name>.herokuapp.com/new

Before deploying the frontend application to Heroku, you have to change some parts of the code for it to work with Heroku.

There we go, now that we deployed the application on Heroku, we can visit 

https://<your-Frontend-app-name>.herokuapp.com

you might want to quickly register an admin account and turn off registration as soon as possible.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52781529/nginx-heroku-docker-is-it-possible-to-run-nginx-as-a-reverse-proxy-on-heroku

Collaborating with CTFNote (Old)