Installation

How to build FollyChess from source.

FollyChess is distributed as source code. To run the engine, you build it for your own environment.

Prerequisites

  1. A C++23 compiler, such as Clang 17 or newer.
  2. Bazel, available in your PATH.

Compiling

To build the command-line binary, run:

git clone https://github.com/aryann/follychess.git
cd follychess
bazel build --compilation_mode=opt //cli:follychess
--compilation_mode=opt tells the compiler to apply optimizations. The engine is much slower without it.

The binary is written to bazel-bin/cli/follychess.

Next: Usage explains how to connect the engine to a chess GUI and which commands it supports.