🔍 CTF Writeups Search

A fast and efficient search engine for CTF (Capture The Flag) writeups and solutions, powered by Typesense. Search through a curated collection of 25,000+ CTF writeups with instant results and smart filtering.

View it live here: https://ctfsearch.hackmap.win

Features

• 🚀 Instant search with typo tolerance
• 🏷️ Smart category filtering
• 📱 Mobile-friendly interface
• 🌓 Dark/Light theme support
• ⚡ Fast and responsive UI

Tech Stack

This search experience is powered by Typesense, an open-source, typo-tolerant search engine. It's designed as a faster alternative to Elasticsearch and an open-source alternative to Algolia.

The frontend is built with:

• InstantSearch.js
• Typesense Instantsearch Adapter
• Bootstrap 4
• Parcel bundler

The search backend runs on Typesense, which can be self-hosted or used via Typesense Cloud.

Project Structure

• src/ - Frontend components and styles
• scripts/indexer/ - Python scripts for data indexing
• scripts/data/ - Sample dataset and transformation scripts

Development

To run this project locally:

1. Install dependencies:

yarn

2. Start Typesense server (requires Docker):

yarn run typesenseServer

3. Set up environment:

cp .env.example .env

4. Index the data:

yarn run indexer:transformWriteups
yarn run indexer:importToTypesense

Data must be in the scripts/data/writeups.json file. In this format:

{
  "documents": [
    {
      "title": "Writeup Title",
      "url": "https://example.com/writeup",
      "author": "Author Name",
      "mirror_url": "https://example2.com/writeup",
      "date": "2024-01-01",
      "base64_content": "base64_encoded_content"
    }
  ]
}

5. Start development server:

yarn start

Open http://localhost:3000 to see the app.

Environment Variables

Create a .env file with the following variables:

TYPESENSE_API_KEY=xyz
TYPESENSE_HOST=localhost
TYPESENSE_PORT=8108
TYPESENSE_PROTOCOL=http
TYPESENSE_SEARCH_ONLY_API_KEY=xyz

Deployment

The app is designed to be hosted on AWS S3 with CloudFront as CDN:

yarn build
yarn deploy

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

License

MIT License - feel free to use this code for your own projects.

References

• Based on Typesense showcase-books-search