Lichess Docker Container

Docker setup for Lichess development. Based on BrandonE's original Lichess Docker setup (since that one doesn't work anymore).

Usage

1. Clone or download this repo and cd into it
2. Build the image: docker build --tag lichess .
3. Clone or downlod lila and lila-ws. It's assumed they are placed in $HOME/dev/lichess/{lila,lila-ws} if you're on Linux or using Windows with WSL and in C:\dev\lichess if you're running Docker directly from Windows. If you place them somewhere else, you'll have to modify docker-run.sh or docker-run.bat or the command below to use the correct path.
4. Create and start the container:

On Linux or WSL, either run ./docker-run.sh or the following command (make sure to adjust $HOME/dev/lichess if you cloned lila and lila-ws to a different directory):

docker run \
    --mount type=bind,source=$HOME/dev/lichess,target=/home/lichess/projects \
    --publish 9663:9663 \
    --publish 9664:9664 \
    --publish 8212:8212 \
    --name lichess \
    --interactive \
    --tty \
    lichess

If you are starting the container directly from Windows, you can use docker-run.bat instead (again, make sure to adjust the mount point to the actual directory where lila and lila-ws are located). However, I strongly recommend running Docker from WSL 2 and placing lila and lila-ws in the WSL 2 file system since that will significantly speed up compilation.

5. The contianer will automatically start redis and mongo but won't build or run any lila services, so you will have to do that manually. I generally create two or three additional sessions using docker exec -it lichess bash in new terminal windows:
   • One to run lila-ws using cd ~/projects/lila-ws and sbt run.
   • Another in ~/projects/lila/ui to build the client-side code there i.e. compile SCSS and TypeScript to CSS and JavaScript:
     • ./build -w to build everything and then watch for changes and rebuild. This is quite performant nowadays so it's probably what you want.
     • ./build just builds everything once and then exits.
     • ./build --sass to only build SCSS
     • ./build analyse to only build the analyse module and similarly for other modules
     • See the ui readme for more details
   • Sometimes, you might want a 3rd session to run other miscellaneous stuff like accessing the db via mongo lichess. You might also want to check out lila-db-seed to populate your db with some test data.
   • And ofc, the main session will be used to run lila itself using ./lila and then run. Before the first run, you should also run mongo lichess bin/mongodb/indexes.js to create db indices.
   • You should also read the Lichess Development Onboarding guide on the Lichess GitHub wiki for additional instructions on seeding the db, gaining admin access, or running suplementary services like fishnet for server analysis or playing vs Stockfish

Note, that with the run command above (or docker-run.sh) or the start command below, the container will be stopped (but not deleted) when the main session exits, so that session always has to be kept alive and ideally should be terminated last.

Useful commands

• Stop the Docker container: docker stop lichess
• Restart the Docker container and attach to it: docker start lichess --attach --interactive
• Open a second shell in the running container: docker exec -it lichess bash
• Remove the Docker container (e.g. to mount a different volume): docker rm lichess

License

• build/nvm-install.sh is licensed under the MIT license. See the file's header.
• build/sdkman-init.sh is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. See the file's header.
• All other code is in the public domain.