Stockfish container

This image builds Stockfish 18 from source on a digest-pinned UBI 10.2 base. The source archive and both embedded NNUE networks are verified with full SHA-256 checksums during the build.

Stockfish is a UCI chess engine, not a graphical chess application.

Build

The default build targets 64-bit Intel/AMD CPUs with AVX2:

podman build -t localhost/stockfish:18 .

On an arm64 builder, select Stockfish's ARMv8 target:

podman build \
  --build-arg STOCKFISH_ARCH=armv8 \
  -t localhost/stockfish:18-arm64 .

Run

Start an interactive UCI session:

podman run --rm -it localhost/stockfish:18

For example, enter these commands at the Stockfish prompt:

uci
isready
position startpos
go depth 12
quit

Run a non-interactive smoke test:

printf 'uci\nisready\nquit\n' | podman run --rm -i localhost/stockfish:18

To optimize for another CPU instruction set, pass one of Stockfish's supported ARCH values as STOCKFISH_ARCH; for example, x86-64, x86-64-sse41-popcnt, or x86-64-avx512.