About

@tgchessbot is a Telegram bot. You can play chess using @tgchessbot. To play with friends, create a group and invite @tgchessbot into it. If you wish to play alone, talk to @tgchessbot on a 1-on-1 private message.

Hosting @tgchessbot on your own server

• Register a bot with the BotFather
• After installing Python3 and pip on a server, perform the following:

sudo pip3 install telepot
sudo pip3 install python-chess
sudo pip3 install Pillow

• Download the code from my Github repo
• Replace the telegram_bot_token variable (near the bottom of tgchessbot.py) with your own bot token from BotFather
• Shoot up a screen and run python3 tgchessbot.py. Detach using Ctrl + A + D. The bot will continue running and handle messages in the background as long as your server is up.

Deploy with docker

• Fill .env file
• Build and start container:

docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d

Blog post

To learn more, read the blog post here: http://davinchoo.com/project/tgchess/

Acknowledgements

This bot is built with the help of telepot, python-chess and Pillow, with chess piece images from Cburnett on Wikipedia.

Many thanks to vesatoivonen for useful suggestions and bug fixes.