UCI Test Suite

A Python-based set of tests for UCI server/chess engine implementations (such as Stockfish).

Overview

The UCI Test Suite is designed to test the correctness of a chess engine's implementation of the Universal Chess Interface (UCI) protocol, not its playing strength. This makes it useful for testing new chess engines or modifications to existing ones.

Features

• Tests basic UCI protocol commands and responses
• Checks position handling and move calculation
• Validates different time control parameters
• Supports various UCI options like Ponder and MultiPV
• Tests run in order of increasing complexity
• Testing continues even if individual tests fail

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).

Run with --help to see all available command-line options.

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 uci-test-suite.

Run the test suite using the following command line:

uvx uci-test-suite@latest /usr/local/bin/stockfish

Uv

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

uv run uci-test-suite /usr/local/bin/stockfish

Development

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/AnglerfishChess/uci-test-suite.git
# ... or
#    git clone git@github.com:AnglerfishChess/uci-test-suite.git

cd uci-test-suite

# Create a virtual environment
uv venv --python python3.10

# Activate the virtual environment
source .venv/bin/activate  # On Unix/macOS
# or
.venv\Scripts\activate     # On Windows

# Install the package in development mode
#    uv pip install -e .
# or, with development dependencies
uv pip install -e ".[dev]"

# Resync the packages:
uv sync --extra=dev

# Run tests
pytest

# Check code style
ruff check

Release process

uv build
uv-publish