Skol Arena

Skill Or Luck? — an open-source platform for running persistent competitive communities.

Website · Features · Documentation · Releases · Docker Hub

What is Skol Arena?

Skol Arena is an open-source platform for running persistent competitive communities. Run championships, ranked ladders and elimination brackets while player profiles, rankings, history and statistics stay in one place.

More than a tournament bracket

Most tournament tools are built around a single event: an organizer sets everything up, players show up, scores get entered, the event ends — and the history resets before the next one.

Skol Arena is designed for communities that keep competing. Players play when they are available, build a record over time, take part in seasons, and eventually meet in a final bracket. Profiles, match history and standings stay put across events; a new ranked season is the one thing you choose to reset — or carry over. It suits clubs, gaming communities, companies, campuses and local groups that want to run competitions without relying on spreadsheets and scattered tools.

It is player-driven: participants create and report their own matches, confirm or contest results, and keep the competition moving without routing everything through one person.

It is self-hostable and ships as a single Docker image holding the API, the built web app and its database migrations. You bring a PostgreSQL database and nothing else. Your data stays on your infrastructure.

Features

One player base, three independent competition modes — run one, or all three side by side:

• Championship — flexible competitions that run over time. Persistent standings, configurable scoring, and fairness limits that stop a season-long championship from being gamed.
• Bracket — single or double elimination, losers bracket and bronze match. Draw at random, or seed the bracket from a finished championship's standings.
• Ranked — a continuous Elo-derivative MMR ladder with dynamic tiers, per-discipline team scoring, and instant feedback after every match.

Across every mode:

• Player-driven match workflow — create, report, confirm, correct, contest and cancel from the player side, with configurable validation levels per tournament.
• Formats beyond 1v1 — solo, persistent team rosters, or teams assembled per match, with configurable team sizes.
• Mobile-first and installable — purpose-built mobile screens and a PWA, in French and English.
• Access control — native login or Keycloak SSO, invite-only registration, and organizations that scope a tournament to a group.

→ Full feature tour

Getting started

Run an instance

docker run -d \
  -p 3000:3000 \
  -e DATABASE_URL='postgres://user:password@host:5432/skol_arena' \
  -e BETTER_AUTH_SECRET='a-long-random-string' \
  -e BETTER_AUTH_URL='http://localhost:3000' \
  quent1l/skol-arena:latest

Migrations run automatically at startup, and an initial super-admin account is created on the first boot against an empty database — its generated password is printed to the container logs.

→ Docker Compose setup, reverse proxy and first-boot guide

Develop

Prerequisites: Bun 1.3+ and an empty PostgreSQL 16+ database, owned by a role allowed to create tables. Create it yourself — the app never creates its own database:

createdb skol_arena

git clone https://github.com/Quent1L/skol-arena.git
cd skol-arena
bun install

cp backend/.env.example backend/.env   # set DATABASE_URL and BETTER_AUTH_SECRET

bun run dev                            # start every workspace

There is no separate migration step: the backend applies every pending migration at startup, so the first bun run dev creates the schema.

Service	URL
Backend (Hono + Bun)	http://localhost:3000
Frontend (Vue 3 + Vite)	http://localhost:5173
Docs site (Astro)	http://localhost:4321

→ CONTRIBUTING.md has the full command reference, the architecture and the conventions.

Documentation

Website	What Skol Arena is and why it exists
Features	The complete feature tour
Self-hosting	Quick start and prerequisites
Deployment	Docker image, Compose, first boot
Environment variables	Every variable the app reads
How it works	Matches, disciplines, MMR, accounts
API versioning	Header-based version negotiation
Releases	Changelog for every version
Docker Hub	Published images

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are open. It is a real project used by real leagues, and it gets better fastest when the people running them say what is missing.

Commits must follow Conventional Commits — commitlint enforces it, and releases are derived from them. Before opening a pull request:

bun run lint && bun run type-check && bun run test:unit

Read CONTRIBUTING.md first. By participating you agree to the Code of Conduct. To report a vulnerability, see SECURITY.md — please don't open a public issue for it.

License

Skol Arena is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0-only).

It is meant to be run by clubs, workplaces, bars and independent organizers on their own hardware, with their own data. The AGPL keeps that true for everyone downstream: modify it, deploy it, run it for your community — and if you offer it to others as a service, the changes go back to the commons.

You want to…	AGPL-3.0
Run Skol Arena for your club, league, workplace or business — including commercially	✅ Allowed
Modify the code and run your modified version	✅ Allowed
Redistribute the source, or images you built yourself	✅ Allowed — under AGPL-3.0, with the source
Offer a modified version as a hosted service (SaaS)	✅ Allowed — you must offer that instance's users the complete corresponding source of your version (§13)
Keep your modifications private while serving them to third parties over a network	❌ Not allowed
Ship Skol Arena inside a closed-source or proprietary product	❌ Not allowed
Re-license the code under a permissive or proprietary license	❌ Not allowed
Remove the copyright and license notices	❌ Not allowed

This table is a plain-language summary, not legal advice. The LICENSE file is the only authoritative text.