chess-uci-mcp

An MCP bridge that provides an interface to UCI chess engines (such as Stockfish).

Dependencies

You need to have Python 3.10 or newer, and also uv/uvx installed.

Usage

To function, it requires an installed UCI-compatible chess engine, like Stockfish (has been tested with Stockfish 17).

In case of Stockfish, you can download it from https://stockfishchess.org/download/.

On macOS, you can use brew install stockfish.

You need to find out the path to your UCI-capable engine binary; for further example configuration, the path is e.g. /usr/local/bin/stockfish (which is default for Stockfish installed on macOS using Brew).

The further configuration should be done in your MCP setup; for Claude Desktop, this is the file claude_desktop_config.json (find it in Settings menu, Developer, then Edit Config).

The full path on different OSes

• macOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

• Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

• Linux: ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

Add the following settings to your MCP configuration (depending on the way to run it you prefer):

Uvx (recommended)

Uvx is able to directly run the Python application by its name, ensuring all the dependencies, in a automatically-created virtual environment. This is the preferred way to run the chess-uci-mcp bridge.

Set up your MCP server configuration (e.g. Claude Desktop configuration) file as following:

To pass options to the engine, add them to the args array. For example, to set the Threads and Hash options for Stockfish:

Uv

Use it if you have the repository cloned locally and run from it:

Similarly, to pass options when running with uv:

Command-line Options

The application accepts the following command-line options:

• ENGINE_PATH: (Required) The path to the UCI-compatible chess engine executable.

• --uci-option or -o: Set a UCI option. This option can be used multiple times. It takes two arguments: the option name and its value (e.g., -o Threads 4).

• --think-time: The default thinking time for the engine in milliseconds. Defaults to 1000.

• --debug: Enable debug logging.

Available MCP Commands

The bridge provides the following MCP commands:

1. analyze - Analyze a chess position specified by FEN string

2. get_best_move - Get the best move for a chess position

3. set_position - Set the current chess position

4. engine_info - Get information about the chess engine

Development

Release process

1. Bump version in pyproject.toml, chess_uci_mcp/__init__.py and uv.lock.

2. Build and publish:

We use uv-publish (install via uvx uv-publish or as dev dependency) because it automatically reads PyPI credentials from ~/.pypirc.

3. Tag and push:

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