Over the last two years, I developed a tournament system called Bracket.
Most (if not all) tournament systems available online are paid and ask tons of money (a typical minimum subscription costs 50 euros per month, and go up to 500 euros per month or so), which is not feasible for many small sport clubs/individuals. So I developed my own system and put it publicly on GitHub. AFAIK this is the only open source tournament system available that has a significant amount of features.
I made this tournament system for my badminton club and hosted six paid tournaments successfully.
It features flexible setups, where a tournament can have multiple stages and each stage can have multiple "items" (round robin, single elimination or swiss).
Backend is written in async Python with FastAPI and frontend in Next.js with the great Mantine library.
I would appreciate some feedback!
GitHub: https://github.com/evroon/bracket
Demo: https://www.bracketapp.nl/demo
Docs: https://docs.bracketapp.nl
wavemode•1mo ago
Online self-signups are really nice because they let players know how many have already signed up - if you're debating whether to drive across town to play, it's nice to know you're not going to get there and it turns out only 4 people showed up. It's also nice for tournament directors for the same reason, as you get a sense in advance for how many people to expect.
I'm also curious whether you've considered integrating this with Twilio or something similar, to send text messages. A big annoyance in running any tournament is making sure people get notified when their next match is up. Casual tournaments are often run in venues where people who are waiting for their next game tend to wander away to get food or a drink, or have a smoke.
The other big thing that strikes me about the demo is, how manual it all seems to be. Unless I'm just missing it, there doesn't seem to be a way to arbitrarily randomize teams and/or randomize a bracket of all entrants, you have to go through and assign team by team. I would definitely add lots of automation/randomization features, if there aren't any, as it's a big time saver for tournament directors.
tripleseven•1mo ago
> does this support players signing themselves up? Or do they have to show up in person and the tournament director signs them up?
Ah this isn't implemented yet as I haven't really come up with this idea yet, but it would be great to have this feature so I created an issue for it :) https://github.com/evroon/bracket/issues/1200. Feel free to leave more feedback there as well.
> I'm also curious whether you've considered integrating this with Twilio or something similar, to send text messages
Interesting idea as well! I haven't implemented any kind of notifications so far yet either. But it seems very useful, also from my experience with hosting these kind of tournaments. I'll think about what the best way to implement this is that would be easy (and free/cheap) to selfhost. Maybe it can be done using javascript serviceworkers that just send web notifications. That would be free. AFAIK text messages would always cost money to send.
mathgeek•1mo ago
hdjrudni•1mo ago
I've integrated with Twilio. I pay a whole bunch of money every month for sending SMSs. And then recently they made me jump through a bunch of regulation hoops. Had to give them all my business documents.
So even if OP does all the work of integrating it, I assume OP isn't going to pay the fees for you, so then you have to create your own Twilio account and jump through the same hoops.
tripleseven•1mo ago
mathgeek•1mo ago
Not everyone does. It's a typical 80/20 problem (the 80% being those who use the technology that's easy to develop for, the other 20% being the hard part). 80/20 not being the exact numbers, obviously.
That being said, you certainly don't _have_ to cover more than one way of sending notifications, but that's a decision to be made and the consequences acknowledged.
sn0wf1re•1mo ago