Lichess Development Onboarding (Windows)

The following instructions explain how to set up your development environment for Lichess on Windows.

GNU/Linux instructions: https://github.com/ornicar/lila/wiki/Lichess-Development-Onboarding

Note that Windows is not officially supported for lila builds. You can get it to work now, but there is no guarantee that it stays like that.

Prequisites

• Git
• sbt
• MongoDB
• npm from Node.js.
• nginx

Installation steps

1. Clone the lila project to your computer: git clone https://github.com/ornicar/lila.git

2. Using the command prompt, navigate to the directory where you cloned it into: cd lila

3. Set up the submodules: git submodule update --init --recursive

4. Before we compile, we have to change some options related to the memory management of Java, otherwise you'll get an OutOfMemoryException.

    set JAVA_OPTS=-Xms64M -Xmx2048M -Xss4M -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=64m -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
   

5. If you want to compile now, you'll run into an UnmappableCharacterException from the i18n module. It looks like it's related to something with the encoding, but I couldn't figure out the root cause of the issue. There is a workaround though: in modules\i18n\messages\, delete everything except the messages file (the one without file extension). This works unless you want to do something specific to the i18n module, so it's still very ugly. If you find a better way to make the compilation work - without deleting the messages files - please edit this section. Also note that if you want to make a Git commit to submit a pull request to lila, make sure that you do not accidentally commit the deletion of these messages files.

6. Compile the application using sbt compile.

7. Run npm install -g gulp-cli to be able to build the lichess UI.

8. Run this build-ui.bat script to build the UI (based on ui/build): https://gist.github.com/ProgramFOX/5608e07f81daa6a4aa5b9501c684bdf4 (make sure to run it from the lila root directory)

9. Download http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLite2-City.mmdb.gz and unpack it. Then create a data folder in your lila application root and put GeoLite2-City.mmdb in there.

Setting up your web server

1. Add the following line to your hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts): 127.0.0.1 l.org socket.l.org en.l.org

2. Open your nginx.conf file, and add this 'Server' block to the http block:

    server {
      server_name l.org ~^\w\w\.l\.org$;
      listen 80;
    
      error_log logs\lila.access.log;
      access_log logs\lila.error.log;
    
      charset utf-8;
    
      location /assets {
        add_header "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" "*";
        alias <path\to\>\lila\public;
      }
    
      location / {
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_read_timeout 90s;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9663/;
      }
    
      error_page 500 501 502 503 /oops/servererror.html;
      error_page 504 /oops/timeout.html;
      error_page 429 /oops/toomanyrequests.html;
      location /oops/ {
        root <path\to\>\lila\public;
      }
      location = /robots.txt {
         root <path\to\>\lila\public;
      }
    }
    
    server {
      server_name socket.l.org;
      listen 80;
    
      charset utf-8;
    
      location / {
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9663/;
      }
    }
   

Don't forget to change <path\to\> into an actual path.

Running the application.

1. Navigate into the conf directory of your lila application root. Create a file application.conf with these contents:

    include "base"
     
    net {
      domain = "l.org"
      asset.domain = "en.l.org"
      extra_ports = []
    }
     
    geoip {
      file = "data/GeoLite2-City.mmdb"
    }
    
    http {
      port = 9663
    }
   

2. Make sure nginx is running.

3. Make sure a MongoDB server instance is running.

4. Run sbt.

5. When you can input a command, type run 9663 and press enter.

6. In your browser, navigate to l.org