ft_chatons: a last tribute to 42

Almost eight years ago, La Contre-Voie was founded under the name “42l”, a student association at the higher education institution 42Paris — a private, free computer science school funded by French billionaire Xavier Niel.

The L in “42l” stands for ‘Libre’ (free), in the sense of digital freedoms, written in lowercase “because we are not pretentious” and pronounced with an imaginary French liaison “quarante-deux z’ailes” (as-in, forty-two wings) to evoke the wings of freedom. These communication choices, worthy of the young free software association that we were, led us to rename the association “La Contre-Voie” in July 2022, marking our departure from 42 after most of our members had completed their studies.

This network of digital campuses, where we produced more than 70 conferences in three years, is the starting point for our popular education initiative and an integral part of our identity.

As a farewell gift to 42, La Contre-Voie has created a free and open-source educational project called “ft_chatons”, which guides students through the creation of an ethical hosting provider as an alternative to the digital giants.

🔗Creating a CHATONS

The name of the project refers to CHATONS, a French-speaking collective that brings together nearly a hundred organizations aiming to democratize and widespread alternative services to Google, Microsoft, and the like.

This subject of 42 pages involves reproducing a software infrastructure (i.e., a configuration on a computer server) which can host online services, similar to the 42l association when it was first created.

The project requires the installation of several fundamental components:

• an SSO, which allows a single account to be used for all the services, providing the user-friendliness and convenience of a Google account;
• the Nextcloud software suite, a comprehensive alternative to the Google suite;
• a software forge service such as Gitea or Forgejo (your choice), to host code outside of centralized platforms such as GitHub (which is owned by Microsoft);
• …and other software, which you can discover in the subject PDF.

The intention is, of course, to raise students’ awareness of these software alternatives, while guiding them in setting up this free software on a server. The subject is designed to encourage them to use their infrastructure after the end of the project, so that it can serve as a personal cloud that can be shared with friends and family. Students can even apply to become members of the CHATONS collective, as meeting the criteria for the project guarantees compliance with the vast majority of the criteria set out in the collective’s charter.

🔗A project valued in the student curriculum

The subject was developed in partnership with the 42Angoulême campus, which offers 30,000 XP for the project — an amount of experience that represents a major step forward in the student curriculum, motivating students interested in system administration to complete this project.

Released in beta testing following a conference at 42Angoulême on February 19, 2026, the subject may eventually be tested at other volunteer 42 campuses, or even rolled out across the entire 42 network, subject to acceptance by their administration teams.

Finally, unlike almost all of 42’s educational projects, ft_chatons advocates a strict policy on the use of generative AI: its use is formally prohibited during the design of the project and penalized with a grade of -42.

🔗…but also a digital commons

Developed in an open and transparent manner, the ft_chatons topic and its sources are available online and contributions are welcome, especially for translating the topic into other languages or reporting bugs or inconsistencies.

Reusing the sources from a Python bootcamp created by the student association 42AI, the project is published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, allowing free reuse of the subject provided that our work is credited, not used for commercial purposes, and modified versions are published under the same license.

We hope that this subject will make a modest contribution to the digital empowerment of students!

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