Yet another Chess web app.

• play against other users in real-time
• spectate and chat in ongoing games with other users
• optional user accounts for tracking stats and game history
• play solo against Stockfish (wip)
• mobile-friendly
• ... and more (view roadmap)

Built with Next.js 14, Tailwind CSS + daisyUI, react-chessboard, chess.js, Express.js, socket.io and PostgreSQL.

Development

Node.js 20 or newer is recommended.

This project is structured as a monorepo using pnpm workspaces, separated into three packages:

• client - Next.js application for the front-end, deployed to ches.su via Vercel.
• server - Node/Express.js application for the back-end, deployed to server.ches.su via Railway.
• types - Shared type definitions required by the client and server.

Getting started

1. Install pnpm.
2. Install the necessary dependencies by running pnpm install in the root directory of the project.
3. In the server directory, create a .env file for your PostgreSQL database. You can try ElephantSQL or Aiven for a free hosted database.

   PGHOST=db.example.com
   PGUSER=exampleuser
   PGPASSWORD=examplepassword
   PGDATABASE=chessu
   

4. Run the development servers with pnpm dev.
   • To run the frontend and backend servers separately, use pnpm dev:client and pnpm dev:server, respectively.
5. You can now access the frontend at http://localhost:3000 and the backend at http://localhost:3001.

Running chessu with Docker

To build the project with Docker, you can use the provided Dockerfile.

docker build -t chessu .

This command will build the Docker image with the name chessu. You can then run the image with the following command:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -p 3001:3001 chessu

Once built, to start the project with POSTGRES, you can use the provided docker-compose.yml file.

docker-compose up

Please make sure to modify the values in the server/.env file to match the values in the docker-compose.yml file or vice versa.

The entrypoint for the Docker image is set to run pnpm. The Dockerfile's CMD instruction is set to run the project in production mode. If you want to run the project in development mode, you can override the CMD instruction by running the following command:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -p 3001:3001 chessu dev # runs both client and server in development mode
docker run -p 3000:3000 -p 3001:3001 chessu dev:client # runs only the client in development mode
docker run -p 3000:3000 -p 3001:3001 chessu dev:server # runs only the server in development mode

Contributing

Please read our Contributing Guidelines before starting a pull request.

License

MIT