Tourist

What is Tourist?

Simply put - Tourist is an agent that will visit web applications and perform given actions. It was designed for use with CTF challenges that require visiting by a real browser to trigger vulnerabilities.

Instead of packaging a headless browser inside all of your challenges via puppeteer/playwright/selenium - you can deploy a single instance of Tourist somewhere and have all your challenges talk with it to schedule visits.

It can also perform additional actions, for example if your challenge requires generating PDF files from HTML you can also outsource this task to Tourist.

Getting Started

First you need to deploy Tourist.
- We recommend using our docker image from ghcr.io/ctfd/tourist
- You can also reference the docker-compose.yml file
With authentication enabled, you need to copy the issuer token generated for you during the application start up.

Next, using that token, you need to create a token for your application to schedule jobs:

# Issue a non-strict, visit token for visiting example.com valid for 7 days.
import requests

url = "http://localhost:3000/api/v1/issue-token"
token = "<issuer-token>"

headers = {
  "Authorization": f"Bearer {token}"
}

data = {
  "scope": "https://example.com",
}

response = requests.post(url, json=data, headers=headers)
print(response.json()["token"])

In response to that request, you will receive a visit token (by default valid for 7 days), which you can use to schedule jobs:

# Go to https://example.com and take a screenshot synchronously
import base64
import requests

url = "http://localhost:3000/api/v1/sync-job"
token = "<visit-token>"

headers = {
  "Authorization": f"Bearer {token}"
}

data = {
  "steps": [
    {"url": "https://example.com"}
  ],
  # You can create a video and a pdf the same way by using additional options: "RECORD" and "PDF"
  "options": ["SCREENSHOT"]
}

response = requests.post(url, json=data, headers=headers).json()

if response["status"] == "success":
  screenshot_b64 = response["result"]["screenshot"]
  screenshot = base64.b64decode(screenshot_b64)

  with open("screenshot.png", "wb+") as screenshot_file:
    screenshot_file.write(screenshot)

For additional guidance, be sure to check:

The docs
The examples directory
OpenAPI docs (by navigating to a deployed Tourist endpoint)
Unit tests: runner.test.ts, async-job.test.ts and sync-job.test.ts

Configuring Tourist

We recommend using Tourist in Docker, and configuring it with environmental variables. Example (default) config can be seen in the .env.example file which is self-explanatory.

The only required setting is the REDIS_URL. It's also recommend to provide a securely random SECRET - Tourist will generate a random secret key on startup, however if you happen to restart the application your old tokens will become invalid.

For full reference please check our guide on installing Tourist

Authentication

Token authentication is enabled by default. It can be disabled with environmental variables.

Tourist expects the Authorization header with a value of Bearer <token>.

For full reference please check our guide on Tourist authentication

Using actions

You can specify actions to be performed during each step. Actions are an array of strings (code) to be passed to playwright inside an isolated sandbox. There are a few guidelines for you to follow:

You will want to execute methods off of the provided page, and context variables - which will be a playwright Page, and BrowserContext objects respectively - already after navigation to the specified url.
- You can register event handlers by using page.on() - which will be registered before the page loads.
- Use camelCased methods - as in the playwright docs.
- Use JavaScript syntax - TypeScript will not be precompiled.
- Do not use screenshot/record in actions - instead specify this in Tourist options when dispatching the request.
Treat actions as top-level synchronous code. They may return either a concrete value, or a Promise - which will be awaited, however it's not an async context, so if you need to use async/await wrap your action in an IIFE expression.
- As actions can return a Promise - it's completely fine to execute simple playwright calls which return a Promise, without the added complexity - for example page.click('a') is a valid action (although depreciated, which will be awaited.
- Multi-line statements are allowed inside an IIFE expression, so follow the same pattern if you need to use for example, a for loop.

For full reference please check our guide on Tourist actions.

Legacy API

We have been using a previous version of Tourist internally at CTFd for some time. The legacy API matches our previous simpler specification - most notably it does not support authentication, and does not allow choosing between synchronous and asynchronous jobs. It's provided as a compatibility layer for us and should be considered deprecated.

Sentry

Tourist can capture exceptions to Sentry by configuring the SENTRY_DSN environment variable.