iqmaker / stockfish.js

The Stockfish chess engine in Javascript

Stockfish.js

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

Stockfish.js is currently updated to Stockfish 11.

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");

If you don't want to use Web Workers, simply add a script tag, like this:

<script src="stockfish.js"></script>

Then you can create a new instance by calling the STOCKFISH() function.

var stockfish = STOCKFISH();

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

stockfish.postMessage("go depth 15");

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

stockfish.onmessage = function(event) {
    //NOTE: Web Workers wrap the response in an object.
    console.log(event.data ? event.data : event);
};

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

• The Stockfish team
• exoticorn
• ddugovic
• niklasf

License

GPLv3 (see license.txt)