I recently built myself a new Kali Linux lab for playing CTFs using Docker. It is more lightweight and portable than a VM. In this article I will share how it works and how I had to adapt my CTF workflow to support hacking from a Docker container.

If you’ve ever started building a project that is running great locally, only to have it fail to build on a teammate’s machine or when deployed to any other environment despite your meticulous, step-by-step setup instructions, you may want to consider using a tool like Vagrant. Vagrant enables you to build a consistent virtual environment for developing and running software from any machine. It’s easy to make your local development environment mirror your production server while also making it portable. This can save lots of time when someone new joins the project, as the setup is all but done for them already.