Resolving Errno 13 Permission denied

Question

I'm trying to use the stockfish chess engine to make board evaluations through python-chess but getting permission errors.

mac os, python 3.7, Ipython through Conda 4.9.2

Here is the result with just the last line of the traceback:

import chess.engine
engine = chess.engine.SimpleEngine.popen_uci("/Applications/Stockfish.app")
...
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/Applications/Stockfish.app'

I have successfully used chmod to set permissions but am still getting the error.

Please help, quite stuck on this one.

Answer 1

First, Stockfish.app is the desktop app of stockfish on Mac, not the Stockfish engine. So you need to use the engine. You can find old engines here ( https://www.dropbox.com/sh/75gzfgu7qo94pvh/NlXX-QLGu6 ), but for the last engine, you need to install it using HomeBrew: brew install stockfish . See https://stockfishchess.org/download/ for more informations.

Second, in a terminal window, type chmod +x the_stockfish_engine_path to disable the permission restriction.