How to render chess diagrams in Node.js (no DOM, no canvas, no headless browser)

If you've ever needed to generate a chess diagram programmatically — for a blog, a PDF report, or a static site — you've probably hit the same wall I did.

Most solutions require either a browser environment, a headless Chromium instance, or a canvas polyfill that pulls in half of npm. For something as simple as "turn a FEN string into an image," that's a lot of overhead.

So I extracted the rendering core from my chess editor into a standalone package: @chessvision-org/chess-vision. Zero dependencies. Works in Node.js, Deno, Bun, and the browser. No DOM, no canvas, no network calls.

The basics

npm install @chessvision-org/chess-vision