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
Could you perhaps tell me if the problem is fixed now?
My wife organises a lot of double elimination tournaments; could you add that as an option?
Also, it would be cool to see the live demo tournament populated with matches, so you'd get an idea straight away of the experience without needing to create stages etc (but also keep the ability to set up a new tournament).
Lastly re notifications that wavemode suggested; perhaps you let people pay for SMS notifications themselves, as an option beyond web notifications. This page [1] implies that web push notifications are unreliable, on iOS and android.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79215345/reliability-of-...
> My wife organises a lot of double elimination tournaments; could you add that as an option?
Yes there's an open issue about that, I do plan to implement that, hopefully rather soon.
> Also, it would be cool to see the live demo tournament populated with matches
Ah that makes sense. I didn't want to set up everything already because it might not be the way you want it to be and would unnecessarily put load on my server. But a few teams+matches should be doable indeed, good idea!
> Lastly re notifications that wavemode suggested; perhaps you let people pay for SMS notifications themselves, as an option beyond web notifications. This page [1] implies that web push notifications are unreliable,
Ah that's unfortunate. I will look a bit more into Twilio then, thanks for raising that!
You say that you have been using to host badminton tournaments. However, I see that I can add only one score to the match (21-12). I mean there is no set system. ( 21-12, 12-21,21-12).
Am I right in that assumption, looks like there is one github issue also on that. Could you let me know if my understanding is right? I have an upcoming tournament and can test it out if that exists.
Ah yes we didn't use best-out-of-three for those tournaments, just one set per match. So I indeed haven't implemented sets yet, but I do plan to implement that.
Here's a CLI implementation https://github.com/cristiean/bracket
I'm not targeting high school students (specifically) and it's outside the scope of the project to give a background course in DevOps.
I would argue the software is definitely usable by anyone who has some basic experience with Linux and Docker.
If you have specific ideas on how to make selfhosting this easier, I'm certainly curious.
To make this more accessible you'd need to offer a managed version on a cheap vm, at which point you're also managing the overhead of a VM, authentication system, etc. Oof. Obviously out of scope for a side project.
Event organizing is an art. Not just the data but managing payment processing, external communication (email, sms), and other overhead. Godspeed to the folks organizing events and building tools to make it easier.
Yes I agree the only way to make it easier is to offer a hosted version. I already offer the demo which is hosted, but I don't (at this time) want to offer a whole service, because of indeed what you mention + I would have to deal with legal stuff like privacy policies etc.
It's fairly obvious that the largest possible audience would want a turn-key, hosted service, and there are paid options that deliver exactly that. I don't suspect that you were aiming to be "the discord of" this field, and the path to getting there is wildly different.
Great work, and kudos on both the initiative and the progress!
20 years ago, even grandpa could download the LimeWire setup.exe, install it in 1 min, and start hosting and sharing files with anyone on the internet. You would think we would have made progress since then and things would be even easier to host and run. Instead we have regressed: a simple software requires devops expertise to install.
And it appears that Teams are required, even though for a chess tournament like mine, each player is just an individual, and there are no teams involved. So it didn't really feel like a good fit.
None of this is meant as a criticism, just a data point.
Hmm I am planning to add "templates" for stages that you select and it will create stages according to a standard template. For example, first a group stage, followed by a knock-off stage. That should make it even simpler to set up stages. I'll look into the "previous button" problem you describe, maybe something goes wrong there.
> each player is just an individual, and there are no teams involved
Yes I have heard multiple people about this confusion. The idea is that if you have only players (no teams), you just create teams with no players in them. I'd prefer not to implement the idea of "players as teams" because it will make things very complicated. I could maybe adjust the frontend though to just show teams as players in that case.
wavemode•2mo 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•2mo 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•2mo ago
hdjrudni•2mo 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•2mo ago
mathgeek•2mo 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•2mo ago