Elo chess tracker

A small web page to keep track of Elo ratings of chess players of a club.

Install

Now follow instructions to explain how to install the webpage.

Install all dependencies first

Install nodejs and npm package manager

$ sudo apt install nodejs
$ sudo apt install npm

Install typescript and ts-node

$ sudo npm install -g typescript
$ sudo npm install -g ts-node

Install browserify

$ sudo npm install -g browserify

Install all packages required to run the website

First, clone this repository and navigate to its directory. For example

$ cd
$ git clone [email protected]:lluisalemanypuig/elo-chess-tracker
$ cd elo-chess-tracker

Then install the required packages with

$ npm install

Compile the source code

Run the following command to turn all typescript source files into javascript source files.

$ ./compile.sh

Prepare the website

Initialize the database

First, in the root directory of the repository, first initialize the sample database and system configuration file with the following command

$ ./initialize.sh

This will generate an empty database with the following pairs of users and passwords:

Username           | Password                          | Role
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
anatoly.karpov     | "always play king b1"             | Member
bobby.fischer      | "I hate chess"                    | Member, Student
emanuel.lasker     | "oh no, my queen"                 | Member, Teacher
magnus.carlsen     | "it's not playable... for black"  | Member
mikhail.botvinnik  | "the science of logic"            | Member, Admin
vasily.smyslov     | "never play f6"                   | Member, Admin, Teacher

The passwords do not include the quote characters "; they are only used here as delimiters. Yes, passwords include spaces. Usernames correspond to famous chess players. Some of the passwords are quotes attributed to their corresponding chess player, other passwords are quotes attributed to different famous chess players.

Edit the configuration file

Edit the configuration file system_configuration.json appropriately. Said file contains the following fields

{
	"database_base_directory": "$DATABASE_DIRECTORY",
	"rating_system": "Elo",
	"permissions": {
		"admin": [ ],
		"teacher": [ ],
		"member": [ ],
		"student": [ ]
	},
	"ssl_certificate": {
		"directory": "$SSL_CERTIFICATE_DIRECTORY",
		"public_key_file": "$PUBLIC_PEM",
		"private_key_file": "$PRIVATE_PEM",
		"passphrase_file": "$PASSPHRASE_TXT"
	},
	"time_controls": [ ]
}

Directories

If the command abovein the previous section did not fail in any step, the strings headed with $ should have been replaced with a default value.

• "$DATABASE_DIRECTORY" is replaced with "$PWD/database" (where $PWD is the working directory of the command line that executed the script initialize.sh). This directory indicates the path to the database root directory. This directory should contain three subfolders (whose name cannot be changed)

  • users
  • games
  • challenges

• "$SSL_CERTIFICATE_DIRECTORY" is replaced with "$PWD/certificate"

  Indicates the path to the directory that contains the SSL certificate of the webpage. When this field is filled with some value, then the webpage will try to setup the https server with the information provided below.

• "$PUBLIC_PEM" is replaced with "public.pem"

  Public key file of the certificate

• "$PRIVATE_PEM" is replaced with "private.pem"

  Private key file of the certificate

• "$PASSPHRASE_TXT" is replaced with "passphrase.txt"

  Plain text file that contains the certificate's passphrase (if any was specified when creating the certificate)

Rating system

This project only implements Elo's rating system (see this section of lichess for further information on rating systems used by chess websites and chess federations).

Time controls

This webpage admits an unlimited number of time controls, where each time control has a unique rating associated to it. A time control is identified with an id (an arbitrary string, never shown to users), but can have many different names. For example, administrators of the site can configure a Classical time control by adding the following text inside time_controls field.

{
	"id": "Classical",
	"name": "Classical (90 + 30)"
}

Players will have to play their games with time control 90 + 30. But, optionally, administrators of the site can also add a "faster" classical time control, like so

{
	"id": "Classical",
	"name": "Classical (90 + 30)"
},
{
	"id": "Classical",
	"name": "Classical (30 + 30)"
}

If two players play two games, first with time control 90 + 30 and immediately afterwards another game with time control 30 + 30 the result of both games will affect the same rating because both time controls are associated to the same id, in this case Classical.

Permissions

The site implements four different roles a user can have. To each role we can associate a series of actions that a user with said role can perform. All roles implemented are

• admin
• member
• teacher
• student

Available actions are

• Creation of users:

  • create_user

• Creation of games

  • create_game: can create a game. This adds a game into the system even if the players involved are not aware of this.

• Edition of users: to be able to edit user's information, except for passwords and ratings.

  • edit_user: This first action is necessary for the others to work.
  • edit_admin
  • edit_teacher
  • edit_member
  • edit_student

• Edition of a user's game: to change the result of a game.

  • edit_user_games: This first action is necessary for the others to work.
  • edit_admin_games
  • edit_teacher_games
  • edit_member_games
  • edit_student_games

• Assignment of roles to another user

  • assign_role_admin
  • assign_role_teacher
  • assign_role_member
  • assign_role_student

• See another user's games

  • see_user_games: This first action is necessary for the others to work.
  • see_admin_games
  • see_teacher_games
  • see_member_games
  • see_student_games

• Challenge other users to a game

  • challenge_user: This first action is necessary for the others to work.
  • challenge_admin
  • challenge_member
  • challenge_teacher
  • challenge_student

Running the website

Once the configuration file has been properly edited, now we can run the website.

To run the website, use one of the following commands (we recommend using the last one)

$ node ./js-source/app_main.js
$ DEBUG=ELO_TRACKER:* nodemon ./js-source/app_main.js
$ DEBUG=ELO_TRACKER:* npm run devstart

To access it, open a web browser and type in the following address

Without SSL certificate

http://localhost:8080

With SSL certificate

https://localhost:8443