ejnnr / web-chess

A web implementation of a chess database program like Scid.

web-chess

Develop: Master:

A web implementation of a chess database program like SCID.

Setting it up on your local machine

0. Setup Apache, PHP and MySQL if you haven't already
1. Make sure you have the xsl php extension enabled
2. Clone the repository with the --recursive flag
3. Create a MySQL database for web-chess
4. (optional) Create a new MySQL user and give it access to the database you just created (you can also use a pre-existing user if you want)
5. Install composer (http://getcomposer.org)
6. run composer install in your projects root directory
7. make sure apache has writing access to storage/ and vendor/
8. copy .env.example to .env and enter your MySQL credentials there
9. run php artisan key:generate in your project root
10. run php artisan migrate:install
11. run php artisan migrate in your project root
12. install nodejs (https://nodejs.org/)
13. run npm install in your project root
14. run npm run jspm install to install all required javascript libraries
15. run npm run bower install to install the needed Polymer elements
16. run npm run gulp to build everything

WARNING: Since this projects is in an extremely early stage of development, there will often be changes which require you to set up additional database tables or change anything else. If you commit such a change, please also leave a notice here where you explain, what other people have to do to perform the same changes on their machines. You should also put some kind of note into your commit message.

The test directory

The .gitignore file tells git to ignore everything inside test/. However this is NOT were unit tests are supposed to be placed. Use the tests/ directory for that.

UI Concepts

Modes: A mode is a set of options which determine e.g. which windows are shown, whether the next move and other information is hidden (useful for tactics/Guess the Move) and even which database is opened. This can be very useful if used effectively. For example you can create a mode for opening preparation, where the tree view is shown and your preferred database for this task is opened. Or you can create one where engine, annotation window and the database with your own games are opened for going over the games you played recently. There will be some default modes using the example databases for the different situations but of course you can delete/modify them and make your one. You can switch between different modes very swiftly using the mode navigation bar on the right side.

Databases: You probably know a database as a collection of chess games. But in WebChess that's only one of several possible types of databases. A database can also be a tactics database, containing tactic exercises (basically they're also just PGN files with an custom FEN as starting position, but a tactics database can contain additional attributes such as difficulty or whether or not you have solved an exercise correctly already). Another possibility is a repertoire database, which takes care of transpositions automatically. Another advantage of these different types of databases is, that WebChess will automatically open specific windows, depending on which type of database you just opened (of course this behaviour can be modified or turned off entirely). Let's say for example you just opened a tactics database. WebChess will automatically start the tactics trainer with that particular database.