chess-io

Chess-IO

Real-time chess over socket.io. My fork of Reti-Chess.

Built with Node.js | Express | Socket.IO | Pug | chess.js

Games live in memory only: reload or disconnect and the game is gone. There is no database and no accounts — the game link is the only thing gating a game.

Run it

npm install
cp .env.example .env
npm run dev          # or: npm start

npm run dev loads .env and restarts on change. With BASE_PATH=/chess the app serves at http://localhost:8181/chess/.

Configuration

Everything comes from the environment — see .env.example. This replaces the old ENV switch in public/javascripts/app.js, which hardcoded a host and port into the client and had to be hand-edited per deploy.

Var	Default	Notes
PORT	8181	Internal; Apache fronts it in production.
BASE_PATH	(empty)	/chess to mount at a subpath. Empty = domain root.
TRUST_PROXY	(empty)	1 behind one reverse proxy.
LOG_FILE	logs/games.log	What GET /logs serves.
DAW_ORIGIN	(empty)	Local dev only. See "Shared chrome".

BASE_PATH drives three things at once: the Express mount, the socket.io path (${BASE_PATH}/socket.io), and every asset URL in the templates. The client reads it back from window.$BASE, which views/layout.pug emits. Nothing is baked in at build time, so the same tree serves / or /chess unchanged.

Mounted at /chess

The app sits behind Apache at davidwindham.com/chess, same shape as /radio:

ProxyPass        /chess http://127.0.0.1:8181/chess upgrade=websocket
ProxyPassReverse /chess http://127.0.0.1:8181/chess

The prefix is kept on both sides — BASE_PATH=/chess tells the app to expect it. upgrade=websocket is what carries socket.io; it needs httpd 2.4.47+ and no mod_proxy_wstunnel.

Being same-origin with the main site is the point: the client calls io() with no host, so it follows http/https on its own. The old build dialled ws://chess.davidawindham.com:8181 explicitly, which a TLS page blocks as mixed content.

Shared chrome

views/layout.pug renders <daw-header> / <daw-footer> and loads /embed/chrome.js root-relative. In production Apache serves /embed from the WordPress docroot alongside /chess, so it just works.

Locally, hitting node directly on :8181 has no Apache in front and the chrome would 404 — set DAW_ORIGIN=http://daw.stu and the app proxies /embed to the main site. Leave DAW_ORIGIN unset in production. Going through daw.stu/chess doesn't need it either way.

public/stylesheets/daw.css is the integration layer that pulls the page onto the site's slate/card palette. It is deliberately separate from style.css so the migration delta stays isolated — see the comment at the top of that file.

Routes

All relative to BASE_PATH.

Route	Notes
/	Create a game, get a link.
/about
/play/:token/:time/:increment	The board. Params are validated; anything malformed is a 404.
/logs	Serves games.log. Unauthenticated — see below.

Gotchas

• style.css is edited directly — there is no sass build. A style.scss used to sit alongside it but had drifted years out of sync (different button, different palette) with no build step wiring the two, so it was deleted rather than left as a trap. daw.css holds the daw-integration styles separately.
• /logs is public. Nothing gates it. gameLogger is its only writer and it records a running game count and nothing else — no addresses, no chat, no player identifiers. Keep it that way, or put the route behind auth. Operational logging goes to the console logger precisely so it stays out of that file.
• Tokens are the only access control. They're 15 CSPRNG bytes as base64url; TOKEN_RE in server.js pins the shape the /play route will accept.
• Node 24. Runs on the same 24.x as the server. The pre-migration tree (Express 4 / socket.io 2 / jade) also booted on 24 — the upgrade was for support and security, not because 24 forced it.

History

• 2015 — original fork of Reti-Chess.
• 2020 — reworked toward Express 5.
• May 2022 — merged _old back into master, still on the old fork.
• July 2026 — modernized (Express 5 / socket.io 4 / Pug) and mounted under davidwindham.com/chess with the shared site chrome.