/stockfish.js

The Stockfish chess engine in Javascript

Primary LanguageC++GNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

Stockfish.js

Stockfish.js is a pure JavaScript implementation of Stockfish, the world's strongest chess engine.

Stockfish.js is currently synced with Stockfish 10.

API

You can run Stockfish.js directly from the command line with Node.js.

In a web browser, Stockfish.js can be run in a web-worker, which can be created like this:

var stockfish = new Worker("stockfish.js");

The output of the engine is again posted as a message. To receive it, you need to add a message handler:

stockfish.onmessage = function onmessage(event) {
    console.log(event.data);
};

Input (standard UCI commands) to the engine is posted as a message to the worker:

stockfish.postMessage("go depth 15");

Stockfish.js can be found in the npm repository and installed like this: npm install stockfish.

If you want to use it from the command line, you may want to simply install it globally: npm install -g stockfish. Then you can simply run stockfishjs.

In Node.js, you can either run it directly from the command line (i.e., node src/stockfish.js) or require() it as a module (i.e., var stockfish = require("stockfish");).

Note about pondering

The code has been refactored to allow for pondering. However, it can take a long time for Stockfish.js to process the "stop" or "ponderhit" commands. So it could be dangerous to use in a timed game.

In the future, it may be improved upon.

Compiling

You need to have the emscripten compiler installed and in your path. Then you can compile Stockfish.js with the build script: ./build.js. See ./build.js --help for details.

Example

You can try out Stockfish.js online here.

There are also examples in the example folder. You can either open the example/index.html directly in a web browser or run a small static server to try it out. If you have Node.js, you can start a simple web server in that directory like this: node server.js.

There is also a simple example using Node.js (example/simple_node.js).

Alternatively, you can also run Stockfish.js from the command line via ./stockfish.js or node src/stockfish.js.

Thanks

License

GPLv3 (see license.txt)