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How to Contribute to picoCTF

One of our goals with the picoCTF platform is to make CTF style computer security competitions available to anyone who is interested. Our focus is on making the best platform for students and teachers but the platform should also be suitable for any organizations who want to incorporate CTFs into their training or professional development process.

We hope you find the picoCTF platform useful and easy to get started with. Towards that end we welcome any contributions that you find improve your competition. This guide captures the simple process to submit a contribution.

Note: we keep everything in one repository so that anyone can bring up the whole infrastructure at once. We've tried alternate methods, e.g., submodules, but we've found the one-big-repo workflow works best for us.

Getting Setup

The GitHub guide to Forking Projects covers many of these steps in more detail if this is your first time contributing on GitHub.

  1. Create a personal fork of the project on GitHub.
  2. Clone your personal fork to your local computer.
  3. Create a feature branch for the changes you would like to make.
  4. Make your changes and commit along the way.
    • We greatly prefer small single topic features. If at all possible break any wide sweeping changes into logical chunks.
  5. Make sure all the tests are passing.
  6. Once you are done making changes rebase your branch off the latest master branch.
  7. Push your feature branch up to your fork on GitHub and create a pull request.
  8. The picoCTF team will review your pull request.

Staying up to date

Since you are developing on your personal fork of the picoCTF platform you will want to stay in sync with the public version. This can be done by adding the official picoCTF/picoCTF repository as an upstream remote.

GitHub has two good guides that explain this process in greater detail:

  1. Add an upstream remote for the official repository. git remote add upstream https://github.com/picoCTF/picoCTF.git

  2. Fetch any changes from the official repository. git fetch upstream

  3. Merge any changes into your local copy of the repository.

    git checkout master
git merge upstream/master

    Now your local copy of the repository has all the latest changes. Be sure to rebase any private feature branches you are working on off of this fresh version of master.

  4. Push your synchronized branch up to your copy of the repository on GitHub. git push origin master

Git Workflow

The steps described above are our interpretation of a Forking Workflow as excellently described by Atlassian. Additionally please consider reading their section on the Feature Branch Workflow which this is based.

Other common conventions:

  • master is the primary branch and represents the official history of the project.
  • master should always be deployable.
  • Merges to master are done with --no-ff to ensure a merge commit is made.
  • Releases are tagged and live in a release branch. Based on the nature of the picoCTF team these releases are typically centered around a competition. Once a release is made it should only expect to receive bug fixes.

If you are seeking to run your own competition, and don't require the features under active development on master, we recommend working off of a release as a stable, known good point.

Coding

We are in the process of pushing for code quality. Going forward, please:

  • Strive to leave the code base in better shape than when you got it.
  • Add test cases when you add code.
  • Run black code formatter
  • Run Flake8
  • Use underscores (e.g., get_unique), not camelCase (e.g., not getUnique).
  • In docstrings, follow PEP 257
  • Use isort for imports. We have checked in a .isort.cfg to help, so you should just have to run isort -rv .

We really appreciate your help improving the code quality.