charibot

Application which can connect to Lichess using a Lichess BOT account, and start accepting challenges (non-rated, standard + Chess 960).

The application only plays random moves, so it is definitely possible to win against it.

When the application is running, your Lichess BOT account will show up as online at https://lichess.org/player/bots.

Example of a Lichess BOT account which uses this application: https://lichess.org/@/charibot

Releases

Pre-built releases (for windows-x64, macos-x64 and linux-x64) are available at https://github.com/tors42/charibot/releases

They are built with the jlink tool - so no Java installation is needed to run the application. Inside the windows.zip, macos.zip and linux.zip there's a charibot-<version>.zip which can be unpacked into a new directory. And inside that directory the application can be launched from a command-line terminal window - <directory>/bin/bot

Run

You will need a Lichess (BOT) account. If you don't already have a Lichess BOT account, you can create an account at https://lichess.org/signup

There are two ways you can make the application control your Lichess BOT account

1. Using a pre-created token
2. Using OAuth2 PKCE flow

Pre-created token

To use a pre-created token, begin by using a Web Browser to login with your Lichess BOT account (or newly created account) and create the token. You can then start the application with BOT_TOKEN environment variable set to the created token:

$ export BOT_TOKEN=lip_...
$ <directory>/bin/bot

OAuth2 PKCE

To use OAuth2 PKCE flow, you just start the application without a token - and the application will generate a one-time Lichess URL which you can open in an "incognito" Web Browser window and login with your Lichess BOT account (or newly created account) and choose to approve the application:

$ <directory>/bin/bot

Note, the OAuth2 PKCE flow will currently only work if you run the application on your local computer - so if you intend to run the bot deployed on a remote server, you would need to use the BOT_TOKEN alternative (or update this application to make use of a publicly reachable redirect_uri instead of the default localhost... (Example of an application which does that can be found here))

Build

To build, one needs Maven and at least Java 21

$ mvn clean verify

The bot application will be packaged in target/charibot-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.zip (and unpackaged in target/maven-jlink/default/)

Note, the built bot application is a self-contained runtime so it is possible to run it without having Java installed.