GnoChess

GnoChess is an implementation of an online chess server with Gno. It is used to showcase Gno's capabilities for developing semi-complex dApps. It comes with a frontend and a faucet for ease of participation, and the backend and frontend implement many features commonly found in chess servers (full ruleset implementation, leaderboards, time controls, Glicko2 ratings).

This repository hosts both the source code for the GnoChess realm and website, as well as a dedicted tutorial section, originally planned to accompany a talk for Gophercon 2023.

Getting Started

Running GnoChess has a few requirements:

• Go 1.21+
• Node 16+
• make
• git
• A POSIX environment (ie. have a UNIX shell, so Linux or macOS. WSL probably works but nobody tested it.)

After cloning the repository, run go get to install the dependencies, then you can get started by running the following:

make run.web & make run.faucet & make run.gnodev

You can also call the three commands separately to have their individual outputs; here is an example with tmux:

With that done, you will be able to access a (hopefully) working local set-up of GnoChess on http://localhost:1313. At the time of writing, this still requires access through a token: you can pick one of the ones available in the Makefile at the run.faucet section. (Annoying -- it will improve, we're working on it!)

There's a rudimentary set up for working with docker also available on our docker-compose file, though for the time being the local set up using make is recommended!

Workshop tutorial

A Workshop on Gnochess has been held at Gophercon San Diego on 26/09/2023. Follow along on the video or on the slides

You can learn how to make a Gno chess server yourself by following the guides in the tutorial section (at the time of writing, still being developed!). The tutorials are designed to be performed in a GitPod workspace. By clicking the above button, you can access GitPod and start hacking straight away!

After you've done that, click here to jump to the first tutorial.