CKAD Dojo — a free, self-hosted CKAD exam simulator (20 exams, 398 questions, on your own cluster)

If you're prepping for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam, you've probably already found killer.sh, Killercoda, or one of the paid mock-exam platforms. I wanted something different: no account, no cloud dependency, no subscription — just a simulator that runs entirely against my own cluster, so I could rerun the same drills as many times as I wanted without worrying about usage limits. That's CKAD Dojo — free, open source, self-hosted. What it actually does 20 free mock exams, 398 questions, mapped to the official CKAD v1.35 curriculum A 120-minute countdown timer that mirrors the real exam (turns yellow at 15 min, orange at 5, red at 1) An embedded web terminal (ttyd) right next to the question panel — same gesture as the real exam UI, no window-juggling Instant, real scoring: bash functions query the actual state of your cluster against 400+ criteria, question by question. You don't have to wait until the end to know if you got it right. Runs against your own cluster — kubeadm, minikube, or kind (1.28+). Nothing leaves for the cloud. Why "dojo"? Each of the 20 practice sets is themed after a figure from Japanese mythology or the four celestial guardians (Suzaku, Byakko, Genbu, Kirin...). Resources inside each dojo follow the theme, so kubectl get pods genuinely reads like a small story instead of pod-1, pod-2, pod-3. Small detail, but it makes repeated drilling less soul-crushing. The loop Open a dojo — namespaces, workloads and Helm releases get provisioned for you. Scripts are idempotent, so you can rerun them freely. Train in the terminal — question on the left, real shell on the right, resizable divider. Arrow keys to navigate, F to flag a question, collapsible hints if you're stuck. Score whenever you want — not just at the end. Wipe and redo — read solutions.md, clean the cluster, and run the same dojo again tomorrow. The goal is reflex, not memorized answers. It's community-built 14 of the 20 dojos come from contributors — 9 as fully