How to Run lichess‐bot

Running lichess-bot

After activating the virtual environment created in the installation steps (the source line for Linux and Macs or the activate script for Windows), run

python3 lichess-bot.py

The working directory for the engine execution will be the lichess-bot directory. If your engine requires files located elsewhere, make sure they are specified by absolute path or copy the files to an appropriate location inside the lichess-bot directory.

To output more information (including your engine's thinking output and debugging information), the -v option can be passed to lichess-bot:

python3 lichess-bot.py -v

If you want to disable automatic logging:

python3 lichess-bot.py --disable_auto_logging

If you want to record the output to a log file, add the -l or --logfile along with a file name:

python3 lichess-bot.py --logfile log.txt

If you want to specify a different config file, add the --config along with a file name:

python3 lichess-bot.py --config config2.yml

Running as a service

• Here's an example systemd service definition:

[Unit]
Description=lichess-bot
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Environment="PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1"
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /home/thibault/lichess-bot/lichess-bot.py
WorkingDirectory=/home/thibault/lichess-bot/
User=thibault
Group=thibault
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Quitting

• Press CTRL+C.
• If quit_after_all_games_finish is set to true in your config file, lichess-bot will wait for all games to exit. Otherwise, all games will exit immediately.
• It may take several seconds for lichess-bot to quit once all games have exited.

Previous step: Configure lichess-bot