My kids play chess on Chess.com. It's a great product, but the account, the cloud and the ads are not something I want to hand to a nine-year-old — so I built Patzer: a self-hosted, open-source alternative that runs on a Pi, a NAS or an old laptop.

Last week I wrote about the tactic trainer ( Patzer v7.19 ). This time it's about who gets to log in.

What shipped

A contributor added OIDC single sign-on to Patzer (PR #72), and it's in the released Docker image. If you already run an identity provider on your homelab — Authentik, Keycloak, Authelia, Pocket ID, whatever — your chess server can sit behind it.

A few details that matter if you self-host for a family:

Off by default. Nothing changes until you set OIDC_ISSUER and OIDC_CLIENT_ID . Existing installs see no difference.

SSO-only mode. OIDC_ONLY=true removes password login, sign-up and password reset entirely — in the UI and on the server. A fresh install started this way skips the setup wizard, and the first SSO login creates the admin.…