Dirtbags Monarch Of The Hill Server

This is a set of thingies to run our Monarch-Of-The-Hill contest, which in the past has been called "Tracer FIRE", "Project 2", "HACK", "Queen Of The Hill", "Cyber Spark", and "Cyber Fire".

Information about these events is at http://dirtbags.net/contest/

This software serves up puzzles in a manner similar to Jeopardy. It also tracks scores, and comes with a JavaScript-based scoreboard to display team rankings.

How everything works

This section wound up being pretty long. Please check out the overview for details.

Getting Started Developing

If you don't have a puzzles directory, you can copy the example puzzles as a starting point:

$ cp -r example-puzzles puzzles

Then launch the development server:

$ python3 tools/devel-server.py

Point a web browser at http://localhost:8080/ and start hacking on things in your puzzles directory.

More on how the devel sever works in the devel server documentation

Running A Production Server

XXX: Update this

How to set it up

It's made to be virtualized, so you can run multiple contests at once if you want. If you were to want to run it out of /opt/koth, do the following:

$ mkdir -p /opt/koth/mycontest
$ ./install /opt/koth/mycontest
$ cp kothd /opt/koth

Yay, you've got it set up.

Installing Puzzle Categories

Puzzle categories are distributed in a different way than the server. After setting up (see above), just run

$ /opt/koth/mycontest/bin/install-category /path/to/my/category

Running It

Get your web server to serve up files from /opt/koth/mycontest/www.

Then run /opt/koth/kothd.

Permissions

It's up to you not to be a bonehead about permissions.

Install sets it so the web user on your system can write to the files it needs to, but if you're using Apache, it plays games with user IDs when running CGI. You're going to have to figure out how to configure your preferred web server.