MapCTF Dev: Two Weeks of Progress

Hello,

This update covers two weeks of MapCTF development as part of the effort to catch the series up to the current state of the project. Grouping this work into a single post gives a clearer view of how the platform kept evolving across multiple areas at once, from backend behavior and admin tooling to the overall operational experience.

Let’s go!

The first usable backend baseline for MapCTF.

This week MapCTF stopped being a sketch and started becoming a service. We landed the first usable mapctf-api baseline, added config loading and validation, checked in the initial Docker development setup, and established the Go module layout under backend/.

The backend now has recognizable structure instead of future-architecture energy: handlers, config types, utility code, and a sample deployment config are all in place. This is still early-stage plumbing, but the important part is done: the repo can now evolve like a real application instead of a folder full of good intentions.

The backend started getting real domain boundaries.

This week focused on domain foundations. We added teams, users, and challenges packages, expanded API handlers, and introduced JWT-based auth support. The backend test surface also improved with new package tests for backend and cache behavior.

There was a healthy amount of cleanup too: less fatal-exit behavior in core packages, better handler wiring, and a small API testing tool to exercise flows without manually poking endpoints all day. Result: MapCTF is now opinionated enough to store users and teams, issue auth tokens, and pretend to be a product.

See you next week!

Telegram channel: t.me/mapctf

Best regards,

MapCTF Development Updates