Beginner CTF Walkthrough 'Me and my Girlfriend: 1'

This is a walkthrough of the beginner level Capture the Flag challenge from Vulnhub called Me and my girlfriend: 1. As a beginner in the penetration arena I am planning on challenging myself with challenges of ever increasing difficulty and welcome you to follow along. This is just a walkthrough, filmed after I had solved the system once. I was successful in obtaining both flags available, but I don't know how many possible solutions there are. This is just the one I found.

I have used various online resources to learn about cybersecurity, penetration testing and white hat hacking. A couple that I have found invaluable are:

[absolutions]

After uploading the video I did find out there was an even easier way to get root that I had discovered the night before, but didn't realize it at the time. After first gaining access as Alice, I navigated the /var/www/html folders where there was a config.php file. This gave me the root username and password for mysql access, which I used to dig around in the databases and tables. I didn't think the CTF would make it so easy that the plain text password in the config file was the actual root password for the machine, but I was wrong. It was that easy. I don't mind that I didn't find this out last night though as my solution took a little more thinking and testing to find a working solution.