lichess-bot

A bridge between Lichess API and bots.

How to Install

• NOTE: Currently, only Python3 is supported
• Download the repo into lichess-bot directory
• Navigate to the directory in cmd/Terminal: cd lichess-bot
• Install virtualenv: pip install virtualenv
• Setup virtualenv:

virtualenv .venv -p python3 #if this fails you probably need to add Python3 to your PATH
source .venv/bin/activate #for Windows: ./.venv/Scripts/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

• Create your config file wih cp config.yml.default config.yml
• Edit the variants: supported_variants and time controls: supported_tc from the config.yml as necessary

Lichess OAuth

• Create an account for your bot on Lichess.org
• NOTE: If you have previously played games on an existing account, you will not be able to use it as a bot account
• Once your account has been created and you are logged in, create a personal OAuth2 token with the "Play bot moves" selected and add a description
• A token e.g. Xb0ddNrLabc0lGK2 will be displayed. Store this in config.yml as the token field
• NOTE: You won't see this token again on Lichess.

Setup Engine

• Place your engine(s) in the engine.dir directory
• In config.yml, enter the binary name as the engine.name field
• Leave the weights field empty or see LeelaChessZero section for Neural Nets

Lichess Upgrade to Bot Account

WARNING This is irreversible. Read more about upgrading to bot account.

• run python main.py -u

LeelaChessZero

• Download the weights for the id you want to play from here: http://lczero.org/networks
• Extract the weights from the zip archive and rename it to latest.txt
• Download the lczero binary from here: https://github.com/glinscott/leela-chess/releases
• Copy both the files into the engine.dir directory
• Change the engine.name and engine.weights keys in config.yml to lczero and latest.txt
• You can specify the number of engine.threads in the config.yml file as well
• To start: python main.py

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Lichess team, especially T. Alexander Lystad and Thibault Duplessis for working with the LeelaChessZero team to get this API up. Thanks to the Niklas Fiekas and his python-chess code which allows engine communication seamlessly.

License

lichess-bot is licensed under the AGPLv3 (or any later version at your option). Check out LICENSE.txt for the full text.