Administering Chart Engine
The two settings that decide which screens use Chart Engine, the licence that can revoke them behind your back, and everything an administrator deliberately cannot configure.
Chart Engine has a very small administrative surface: two settings and one licence. Everything else — indicators, drawings, alerts, templates, panel layout — belongs to the trader's browser and is not visible to, or configurable by, an administrator.
That is worth stating plainly, because it sets expectations. You cannot push an indicator set to your users, you cannot lock a chart type, and you cannot recolour one market differently from another. What you can do is choose which screens use Chart Engine at all, and keep the licence valid.
The switches
Binary trading
Admin → Binary Options → Binary Settings (/admin/finance/binary/settings).
Reading the screen needs access.binary.settings; saving needs
edit.binary.settings.
Accepted values are CHART_ENGINE and TRADINGVIEW. The value lives inside the
binarySettings JSON row, and the card that sets it renders only when the
Chart Engine licence is verified — an unlicensed install sees a promotional panel
in its place with a link to the Extension Manager.
If the binarySettings row has never been saved, or display.chartType is
missing from it, the trade page falls back to TRADINGVIEW. That is the safe
default: it renders whether or not the addon is installed. Open the settings
screen and save once to make the choice explicit.
Spot, futures and Trading Pro
Admin → Trading Infrastructure → Trading Settings
(/admin/trading/settings), in the Chart group of the General tab. It writes
through the shared system-settings endpoint, so saving needs edit.settings.
Accepted values are CHART_ENGINE and TRADINGVIEW.
The Pro workspace mounts the same chart component in spot or futures context, so
it resolves its provider from spotChartEngine like the classic trade page does.
Setting the classic page to Chart Engine and expecting Pro to stay on TradingView
does not work, and neither does the reverse. There is one answer for all
non-binary trading screens.
The system-settings endpoint applies only the keys you changed, so saving this screen cannot disturb an unrelated setting that happens to be on the same page.
Bot terminal
No setting. The terminal shipped by Algo Trading Bots always asks for Chart Engine, because TradingView cannot draw a strategy's grid ladder, its stop or its fills. Where the addon is absent the terminal falls back to TradingView and loses the overlays — the honest degradation, not an error.
The licence
Chart Engine's identity in the platform is the extension name chart_engine and
the product id 61364182. Activation happens in Admin → Extension Manager
(/admin/system/extension, permission access.extension).
The hourly licence heartbeat reacts to a revoked or expired result for
61364182 by changing configuration:
binarySettings.display.chartTypeis set back toTRADINGVIEW.spotChartEngineis set back toTRADINGVIEW.- The settings cache is cleared, and the binary settings row's own cache is invalidated, so every backend process picks the change up at once rather than after another cache lifetime.
There is no banner, no notification and no audit entry pointing at the licence. Traders simply see TradingView again. If your charts change provider on their own, check the licence before you look for a chart bug.
Note that this is a settings change, not an uninstall. Reactivating the licence does not restore your choice — set both settings back yourself.
Outbound HTTPS to the licence host must stay open for the heartbeat to succeed. A blocked egress rule looks like a licence problem after the grace period expires, which is exactly the failure above.
Permission summary
| Task | Screen | Permission |
|---|---|---|
| Choose the binary chart | /admin/finance/binary/settings |
access.binary.settings to view, edit.binary.settings to save |
| Choose the spot/futures chart | /admin/trading/settings |
edit.settings to save |
| Activate or inspect the licence | /admin/system/extension |
access.extension |
| Change the palette the chart paints from | /admin/design |
access.design |
Chart Engine adds no permissions of its own. Every gate above belongs to a core screen that happens to be where the chart is configured.
What you cannot configure
Deliberately removed. Fifteen colour fields were declared in chart settings, defaulted, and read by nothing at all — they promised a customisation surface that had never existed. Chart colour now comes from the site palette in Appearance & Design → Site Design, which the chart genuinely reads. See Theming.
Indicators are stored in each trader's browser, keyed globally for that browser. A fresh browser starts with Volume in its own panel; after that, the list belongs to the user. There is no server-side copy to seed.
The toolbar is fixed. Which order overlays appear — expiry lines, countdown, take-profit and stop-loss lines — is decided by the trading mode of the screen the chart is mounted in, not by a setting.
Chart Engine has no backend. Candles come from endpoints core and the trading addons already expose, and the server-side cache belongs to those. If candles are missing, the fix is upstream — see Data sources.
Rollout advice
Switching a live platform's chart provider changes what every trader sees, with no per-user opt-out. Two things reduce the surprise:
- Switch binary and spot separately, at least a day apart. If something is wrong you know which surface it is, and you can revert one setting rather than guessing.
- Check both themes before you switch. The chart follows your palette
faithfully, which means a palette with poor contrast produces a chart with poor
contrast. Open
/admin/design, preview light and dark, and look at the chart in each.
Reverting is a single setting change and takes effect on the next page load. No rebuild, no restart.
Next
- Install and enable — the build step that has to happen before either setting does anything.
- Troubleshooting — when the setting says Chart Engine and the page still shows TradingView.