Create a Scenario

You are a ChallMaker or only curious ? You want to understand how the chall-manager can spin up challenge instances on demand ? You are at the best place for it then.

This tutorial will be split up in three parts:

• Design your Pulumi factory
• Make it ready for chall-manager
• Use the SDK

Design your Pulumi factory

We call a “Pulumi factory” a golang code or binary that fits the chall-manager scenario API. For details on this API, refer to the SDK documentation.

The requirements are:

• have go installed.
• have pulumi installed.

Create a directory and start working in it.

mkdir my-challenge
cd $_

go mod init my-challenge

First of all, you’ll configure your Pulumi factory. The example below constitutes the minimal requirements, but you can add more configuration if necessary.

name: my-challenge
runtime: go
description: Some description that enable others understand my challenge scenario.

Then create your entrypoint base.

package main

import (
	"github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v3/go/pulumi"
)

func main() {
	pulumi.Run(func(ctx *pulumi.Context) error {
        // Scenario will go there

		return nil
	})
}

You will need to add github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v3/go to your dependencies: execute go mod tidy.

Starting from here, you can get configurations, add your resources and use various providers.

For this tutorial, we will create a challenge consuming the identity from the configuration and create an Amazon S3 Bucket. At the end, we will export the connection_info to match the SDK API.

package main

import (
    "github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/sdk/v6/go/aws/s3"
	"github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v3/go/pulumi"
	"github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v3/go/pulumi/config"
)

func main() {
	pulumi.Run(func(ctx *pulumi.Context) error {
        // 1. Load config
		cfg := config.New(ctx, "my-challenge")
		config := map[string]string{
			"identity": cfg.Get("identity"),
		}

        // 2. Create resources
        _, err := s3.NewBucketV2(ctx, "example", &s3.BucketV2Args{
			Bucket: pulumi.String(config["identity"]),
			Tags: pulumi.StringMap{
				"Name":     pulumi.String("My Challenge Bucket"),
				"Identity": pulumi.String(config["identity"]),
			},
		})
		if err != nil {
			return err
		}

        // 3. Export outputs
        // This is a mockup connection info, please provide something meaningfull and executable
		ctx.Export("connection_info", pulumi.String("..."))
		return nil
	})
}

Don’t forget to run go mod tidy to add the required Go modules. Additionally, make sure to configure the chall-manager pods to get access to your AWS configuration through environment variables, and add a Provider configuration in your code if necessary.

runtime:
  name: go
  options:
   binary: ./main

You can test it using the Pulumi CLI with for instance the following.

pulumi stack init # answer the questions
pulumi up         # preview and deploy

Make it ready for chall-manager

Now that your scenario is designed and coded accordingly to your artistic direction, you have to prepare it for the chall-manager to receive it. Make sure to remove all unnecessary files, and zip the directory it is contained within.

cd ..
zip -r my-challenge.zip ./my-challenge/*

And you’re done. Yes, it was that easy :)

But it could be even more using the SDK !