500 An Internal Server Error has occurred

Open Source CTFd
1

Hey I’m planning to host a CTF using CTFd
I followed the steps given in this link: Installation | CTFd Docs
After completing the 6 steps it says we can go and check our page in https://localhost:8000
But after opening that,

image
image705×486 12.4 KB

I can only see this, I am unable to understand what the reason for the issue is

Can someone please help me

Thank you…

2

Curious, @dp1 did you make any progress on this? We’ve a CTF instance we spun up with about 20 active connections, and we experienced many 500 Internal Server Errors. What’s odd, is perhaps a week prior, we had spun up an instance with maybe 50 active connections (identically sized AWS host, identical install/build) and we had no issues at all.

@ColdHeat Any insight on where we might look to gain additional insights? Or enable debug logging to collect more info on next run? (assuming problem occurs again).

In my case, I’m using AWS Lightsail instances (2 CPU, 8GB RAM) and the AWS metrics don’t indicate any issue on the HW side.

3

Yeah, I tried it using google cloud, and it worked.
I couldn’t do this on local machine,
To do on local machine I used the docker image, which I could host successfully.

4

Any way I can enable greater logging that would map the different containers to the 500 errors? Some extracts from docker logs for the nginx container below; looking over logs for the other containers didn’t reveal terribly much, certainly not enough for me to point to a cause…

216.200.6.154 - - [08/May/2023:20:37:46 +0000] “GET /challenges HTTP/1.1” 500 7692 “http://3.84.69.70/teams/join” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/113.0.0.0 Safari/537.36”

216.200.6.154 - - [08/May/2023:20:37:46 +0000] “POST /api/v1/challenges/attempt HTTP/1.1” 500 37 “http://3.84.69.70/challenges” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/113.0.0.0 Safari/537.36”

216.200.6.154 - - [08/May/2023:20:37:49 +0000] “GET /api/v1/challenges/68 HTTP/1.1” 500 37 “http://3.84.69.70/challenges” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/113.0.0.0 Safari/537.36”

5

I have the same issue running on a virtual machine.
Using Oracle VirtualBox, Ubuntu server 22.04, and AMD Ryzen 5 processor.
Can’t find any possible cause.