Tool to explore your chess openings

Highlights

• You download all your games only the first time. Next time, you will only download the recent ones.
• There is no special processing step: going from black to white, or from one player to the other is instant.
• You can explore the openings of a group of players.
• When you select a player, only the time controls relevant to this player are displayed.
• You can paste your opening PGN and skip the first moves of book openings.
• You can download the recent games of all your favourite players in one command.
• You can scan the selected games to know if they have reached a specific position (FEN)
• When there is only one result for the next move of the opening, you can replay the game locally or go to the site where the game was played.

This tool needs a Mongo database to cache your data

• Either install MongoDB Community Server
• Or create a MongoDB cluster online (there are some free plans, for example: MongoDB Atlas)

Alternative 1: using executable

• Download the executable for your platform from the releases page
• Follow instructions below replacing {command} with chess-explorer-{os}-{arch}

Alternative 2: using source code

• Install Golang
• git clone https://github.com/yafred/chess-explorer.git
• Open a cmd console and go to the root of the source code directory (where you can see LICENSE, README.md, main.go)
• Follow instructions below replacing {command} with go run main.go

Commands

• Help

  • {command} help

• Feed your database with games:

  • {command} chesscom {username} to download games from https://www.chess.com
  • {command} lichess {username} to download games from https://lichess.org
  • {command} lichess {username} --token {your lichess.org personal API access token} to download games from https://lichess.org at a higher speed
  • {command} sync to download recent games for all users you have already downloaded games for (see commands above)

• Run the command {command} server

• Browse your games on http://localhost:52825

• You can keep your initial download (saves time if you need to reinitialize your database)

  • {command} chesscom {username} --keep {path to a new file}
  • {command} lichess {username} --keep {path to a new file}

• Reinitialize database

  • {command} delete {username}
  • {command} delete lichess.org:{username}
  • {command} delete chess.com:{username}
  • {command} pgntodb {path to your PGN file} --username {username}