Fishtest is a distributed task queue for testing chess engines. The main instance for Stockfish is http://tests.stockfishchess.org
It is currently being used for testing changes on Stockfish, using tens of thousands of games, both on Linux and Windows. The following setup describes a step-by-step installation for a machine that will run test matches (a worker).
On Windows you will need to install Python 2.7.x for x86 (not 3.x series and not 64 bit) from http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.4/python-2.7.4.msi
In case something is not clear please read windows-step-by-step-installation.txt or view https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jePuj9-T4oU
You can download fishtest directly from Github:
https://github.com/glinscott/fishtest/archive/master.zip
or, in case you have a git installation, you can clone it.
git clone https://github.com/glinscott/fishtest.git
Create your username/password at http://tests.stockfishchess.org/signup
To launch the worker open a console window in fishtest/worker directory and run the following command (after changing concurrency to the correct value for your system, see below), providing username and password you've been given.
python worker.py --concurrency 3 username password
or, after the first access, a simple
python worker.py
Option concurrency refers to the number of available cores in your system (not
including Hyperthreaded cores!), leaving one core for the OS. For example,
on my 4 core machine, I use --concurrency 3.
On Linux, you can use the nohup command to run the worker as a background task.
nohup python worker.py &
Once launched, fishtest will automatically connect to host, download the book,
the cutechess-cli game manager and the engine sources that will be compiled
according to the type of worker platform. If default make command is not suitable
for you, for instance if you need to use some other compiler than gcc/mingw,
then you can create a custom_make.txt file in fishtest/worker directory,
containing a single line command that fishtest will run to compile the sources.
This is only if you wish to run your own testing environment (ie. you are testing changes on another engine). As a pre-requisite, the website needs a mongodb instance. By default it assumes there is one running on localhost. You can set FISHTEST_HOST environment variable to connect to a different host. To launch a development version of the site, open a console window in fishtest/fishtest directory and do:
sudo python setup.py develop
./start.sh