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

GUERET Xavier(HIX) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 18:46:28 +0000

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 original content, 5 adapted from other open practice sets (CKAD-exercises, CKAD-Practice-Questions). If you want to add dojo #21, the coverage matrix in the repo shows exactly what's still thin.

Try it
Live overview + quickstart: https://ckad-dojo.tipunchlabs.fr/

Source, docs, curriculum coverage: https://github.com/TiPunchLabs/ckad-dojo

License is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — free for personal and educational use. If a dojo helps you pass, a star on the repo goes a long way for visibility.

Happy to answer questions in the comments, especially on scoring internals or curriculum coverage gaps.

DEV Community: GUERET Xavier(HIX)

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