Skol Arena is now open source
The source is public, the image is on Docker Hub, and the documentation is online. Here is what that means if you want to run your own instance.
Skol Arena has been running real competitions for months — championships that stretch over weeks, elimination brackets drawn from a finished season, and a ranked ladder that never stops. All of it was built in the open in spirit and closed in practice: the Docker image was published, but the source behind it was not, and the only documentation was whatever you could infer from the interface.
That ends with this release. The repository is public, licensed under AGPL-3.0. The image, the documentation, and the code that produces both now sit in the same place.
What is available
- The source — the full monorepo: the API, the web app, the shared schemas, and the documentation site you are reading. Issues and pull requests are open.
- The image —
quent1l/skol-arenaon Docker Hub, published automatically for every released version, plus alatesttag. - The documentation — a self-hosting guide with every environment variable, a full Docker Compose setup, and a reference explaining how matches, disciplines and scoring, MMR and accounts actually behave.
Running your own instance
The application ships as a single container holding the API, the built frontend, and its database migrations, which run at startup. You bring a PostgreSQL database and nothing else:
docker pull quent1l/skol-arena:latestThe deployment guide has the Compose file, the reverse-proxy notes, and how the first administrator account is created. If you want to know what you are signing up for before you spin anything up, Features is the tour and About is the reasoning behind the design.
Why AGPL
Skol Arena 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.
What comes next
Releases are cut from conventional commits, so every version lands with its own changelog and a matching image tag. This blog is where the ones worth explaining get written up in plain language — what changed for the people playing, not just what changed in the code.
If you run an instance, break something, or want a mode that does not exist yet, the issue tracker is the place. It is a real project used by real leagues, and it gets better fastest when the people running them say what is missing.