SkillTree

SkillTree is a free and open source training gamification platform. You model a training curriculum as projects, subjects, skills, badges and quizzes; your own applications report user activity to SkillTree over its REST API; and SkillTree awards points, levels and badges back, then renders progress, rankings, leaderboards and metrics for your trainees. It is designed to add gamified training to software you already run, rather than to replace it.

One artifact, no assembly. The application and its dashboard ship as a single runnable artifact, so there is no separate frontend to deploy or keep in step with the backend. A local PostgreSQL is bundled and tuned for the VM, so the instance serves standalone with no external database, cache or message broker to provision first. The schema is created automatically on your first boot.

Sized to fit, with no swap. This is a Java application, and an uncapped JVM heap alongside a database on a small VM is the classic way to drive a machine into swap. The heap is pinned deliberately so the whole stack fits the recommended size with roughly two gigabytes of memory still available while serving, and the image contains no swap file at all. Raising the heap for a larger VM is a single documented change.

No default or shared credentials ship in the image. The application's own account model puts a fresh install into an unauthenticated setup mode in which the first caller becomes the super user, which is unsafe on a public cloud VM. This image closes that completely. The captured image contains no database and no account of any kind. On the first boot of your instance a one shot service creates the database, generates a unique administrator password, a unique database password and a fresh token signing keystore, and consumes the setup mode itself before anything is reachable from the network, writing the administrator details to a root only file. The service is gated so it cannot start before that has happened, the web front door is gated so it cannot serve before the administrator exists, and a start time guard refuses to run the application on any published example secret.

Key capabilities: projects, subjects, skills, skill groups and skill tags; badges and global badges; quizzes and surveys with graded and self reported answers; levels, points and leaderboards; a skill catalog for sharing skills between projects; approval workflows for self reported work; per project access control and invite only projects; metrics and user progress dashboards; and a full REST API with project tokens for reporting activity from your own applications.

SkillTree is distributed under the Apache License 2.0, free and open source with no per user or per deployment fee. cloudimg is not affiliated with or endorsed by the SkillTree project. cloudimg provides packaging, the secure by default configuration, per instance credential automation, security patching, and 24/7 support with a guaranteed 24 hour response SLA.