Lichess Development With Bloop

Bloop for hacking lila scala code

bloop is a build server. It's the best way to work on lila.

Install it with your package manager and create a userland systemd service for it.

systemctl --user enable bloop
systemctl --user start bloop

After being set up (sbt bloopInstall), bloop can be used to build lila (bloop compile lila) and run it (bloop run lila -m lila.app.Lila -c /path/to/lila/.bloop).

I like to run my local lila as a systemd service, and to restart it by pressing F1. I also have a service notifying me when the restart completes or fail.

You can interface bloop with your text editor using scala metals. You gain full IDE support: incremental compilation, warning and error reports, jump to definition, global renaming, etc. This supports vim, emacs, atom, visual studio, sublime and more. I highly recommend using it.

For details about my setup and vim configs, checkout my dotfiles repository.

bloop will also happily compile and run scalachess, lila-ws, lila-fishnet and probably any scala project.

Known issues

• bloop doesn't know about translation xmls. When one is modified, you need to do bloop clean i18n from the project root and restart lila to pick it up.
• bloop doesn't watch and recompile playframework routes. Until we find a way to fix that (can you help?), the workaround after editing conf/routes is to run sbt playRoutes.
• The bloop CLI does not currently install via homebrew on M1 Macs. However, you should still be able to install bloop (non-CLI) by installing Metals with VSCode. Note that you will not be able to run bloop commands from the terminal.