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BlockChess

It's chess... on a blockchain.

This was just built for fun and is missing some functionality, but all chess logic is performed and persisted on chain.

First you need to create an account with the NEAR hosted wallet, which will prefund the account, then just click the create game button. When the game has been created, share the link with anyone and the first person to join will be the opponent.

Feel free to contribute, I will only be tinkering with this in my spare time but am happy to review or help any PRs.

This contract is only deployed to the testnet because the UX is a lot simpler with prefunded accounts, but it can be deployed to any NEAR chain.

Contract explorer

This React app was initialized with create-near-app

Quick Start

To run this project locally:

  1. Prerequisites: Make sure you've installed Node.js ≥ 12
  2. Install dependencies: yarn install
  3. Run the local development server: yarn dev (see package.json for a full list of scripts you can run with yarn)

Now you'll have a local development environment backed by the NEAR TestNet!

Go ahead and play with the app and the code. As you make code changes, the app will automatically reload.

Exploring The Code

  1. The "backend" code lives in the /contract folder. See the README there for more info.
  2. The frontend code lives in the /src folder. /src/index.html is a great place to start exploring. Note that it loads in /src/index.js, where you can learn how the frontend connects to the NEAR blockchain.
  3. Tests: there are different kinds of tests for the frontend and the smart contract. See contract/README for info about how it's tested. The frontend code gets tested with jest. You can run both of these at once with yarn run test.

Deploy

Every smart contract in NEAR has its own associated account. When you run yarn dev, your smart contract gets deployed to the live NEAR TestNet with a throwaway account. When you're ready to make it permanent, here's how.

Step 0: Install near-cli (optional)

near-cli is a command line interface (CLI) for interacting with the NEAR blockchain. It was installed to the local node_modules folder when you ran yarn install, but for best ergonomics you may want to install it globally:

yarn install --global near-cli

Or, if you'd rather use the locally-installed version, you can prefix all near commands with npx

Ensure that it's installed with near --version (or npx near --version)

Step 1: Create an account for the contract

Each account on NEAR can have at most one contract deployed to it. If you've already created an account such as your-name.testnet, you can deploy your contract to blockchess.your-name.testnet. Assuming you've already created an account on NEAR Wallet, here's how to create blockchess.your-name.testnet:

  1. Authorize NEAR CLI, following the commands it gives you:

    near login

  2. Create a subaccount (replace YOUR-NAME below with your actual account name):

    near create-account blockchess.YOUR-NAME.testnet --masterAccount YOUR-NAME.testnet

Step 2: set contract name in code

Modify the line in src/config.js that sets the account name of the contract. Set it to the account id you used above.

const CONTRACT_NAME = process.env.CONTRACT_NAME || 'blockchess.YOUR-NAME.testnet'

Step 3: deploy!

One command:

yarn deploy

As you can see in package.json, this does two things:

  1. builds & deploys smart contract to NEAR TestNet
  2. builds & deploys frontend code to GitHub using gh-pages. This will only work if the project already has a repository set up on GitHub. Feel free to modify the deploy script in package.json to deploy elsewhere.

Troubleshooting

On Windows, if you're seeing an error containing EPERM it may be related to spaces in your path. Please see this issue for more details.