Elite Dangerous Commander Assistant System

Shows system information compact for explorer.

THIS REPO IS OUT OF DATE

Currently edcas is being developed on a private repo. Open source release will be available soon.

Gotta see all those planets!

Track your materials!

And much more!

Features

edcas is a fast terminal UI (TUI) that reads your Elite Dangerous journal logs live and organises everything into tabbed views.

Exploration

• System and its bodies represented in a compact, scannable view
• Body details: type, terraforming state, estimated scan/mapping value, gravity, atmosphere, materials
• Lists the signals found in a system so you can find Raxxla ASAP
• Mining tab that surfaces the data that actually helps you mine

Commander & ship

• Commander overview — ranks, reputation, credits and powerplay
• Ship, modules and on-foot suit loadout at a glance
• Engineering workshop — track materials, modules and blueprint progress

Galaxy & trade (powered by the edcas server / EDDN)

• Station and fleet-carrier search with live market, outfitting and shipyard data
• Faction / background-simulation (BGS) search
• Trade-route and trade-loop finder
• "Nearest commodity" search for buying/selling runs
• Construction-depot (colonisation) tracking for the constructions you'll never finish
• GalNet news tab to keep track of what the feds are doing

Data sharing

• Contributes back to the community: uploads sanitised data to the EDDN network (like EDMC / EDDiscovery) and, optionally, to the edcas API — each is an independent opt-in/opt-out toggle (see Data uploads)

Quality of life

• Background journal file watcher — the UI updates live as you play
• Pin entries and keep a personal todo list
• Runs natively on Linux & Windows, or in the browser via WebAssembly
• Self-hostable server (EDDN ingest + REST API) — or just use the public instance
• Written in rust so you know its good
• All open source

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Running the client

Install a pre-built package

Debian / Ubuntu

Download the .deb from the releases page and install:

sudo dpkg -i edcas-client.deb

Arch Linux (AUR)

paru -S edcas-client-bin

Or with makepkg — download the PKGBUILD and run:

makepkg -i

Build from source

Requirements

• Rust (stable) — install
• ~10 GB disk space for the build cache

System dependencies (Debian / Ubuntu)

sudo apt install cmake pkg-config build-essential git \
    libwayland-dev libglib2.0-dev libgdk3.0-cil-dev \
    libappindicator3-dev libsoup-3.0-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libxdo-dev

Build and run

git clone https://github.com/arne-fuchs/edcas-client
cd edcas-client
cargo run --release

Run in the browser (WebAssembly)

The client can also be compiled to WebAssembly and served as a static web page using xterm.js as the terminal emulator. File I/O and journal reading are disabled; the search tabs (Stations, Carriers, Factions, Construction) work via async HTTP.

Requirements

• wasm-pack — cargo install wasm-pack
• Any static file server (e.g. Python's built-in one)

Build

./web/build.sh
# equivalent: wasm-pack build --target web --out-dir web/pkg

Serve

cd web
python3 -m http.server 8080
# open http://localhost:8080

Settings and pinned entries are stored in localStorage and survive page reloads.

Configuration files

File	Default location	Fallback
settings.json	$HOME/.config/edcas-client/settings.json	./settings.json
Assets (materials.json, …)	/usr/share/edcas-client/	./

Launch alongside the game (min-ed-launcher)

Add to your min-ed-launcher config at ~/.config/min-ed-launcher/settings.json:

"processes": [
    {
        "fileName": "/usr/bin/edcas-client",
        "arguments": ""
    }
]

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Data uploads (EDDN & edcas API)

As you play, edcas can share data with two destinations. Both are on by default and each can be turned off independently in the Settings tab.

Setting	Default	Description
edcas_api_enabled	true	Upload journal events to the edcas API (api_url) for the search/trade features
eddn_enabled	true	Upload to the public EDDN network
eddn_url	https://eddn.edcd.io:4430/upload/	EDDN upload gateway
eddn_test_mode	true	Send to EDDN's test pipeline (validated but not relayed)

What gets sent to EDDN

Like EDMC and EDDiscovery, edcas converts a curated, sanitised subset of your journal into the public EDDN schemas: journal/1 (Docked, FSDJump, Scan, Location, SAASignalsFound, CarrierJump) plus commodity/3, outfitting/2 and shipyard/2 from the game's Market.json / Outfitting.json / Shipyard.json. All _Localised strings and Cmdr-specific fields are stripped before sending, per the EDDN rules.

Going live

There is no registration for EDDN — you just start uploading. edcas identifies itself with the softwareName EDCAS and its crate version, and will automatically appear in the EDDN stats at https://eddn.edcd.io/.

The client ships in test mode so the first real-world data goes to EDDN's test pipeline. Once you've confirmed uploads succeed (look for HTTP 200 OK in the log; a 400/426 indicates a schema problem), turn off EDDN Test Mode in the Settings tab to contribute to the live network. If you ever need beta/dev endpoints, ask in the #eddn channel of the EDCD Discord.

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Running the server

The server (edcas-server) listens to the Elite Dangerous Data Network (EDDN) ZeroMQ stream, ingests it into PostgreSQL, and exposes a REST API that the client queries for search results.

You only need to run the server yourself if you want to host your own instance. The public instance at https://edcas.de is used by default.

Requirements

• PostgreSQL 14+
• libzmq (ZeroMQ 4.x)

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo apt install libzmq3-dev pkg-config

Option A — Docker Compose (recommended)

This is the easiest way. From the repository root:

docker compose up --build

This starts PostgreSQL and edcas-server together. The API is available at http://localhost:3000.

Data is persisted in ../edcas-data/postgres-data relative to the repository root.

Option B — Run manually

1. Create the database

createdb edcas

That's it — edcas-server applies the schema and any pending migrations automatically on startup (tracked in a schema_migrations table), so you don't need to run psql -f manually. On an existing database it only creates what's missing.

2. Set environment variables

Variable	Default	Description
DB_HOST	localhost	PostgreSQL host
DB_PORT	5432	PostgreSQL port
DB_USER	(required)	PostgreSQL user
DB_PASSWORD	(required)	PostgreSQL password
DB_NAME	edcas	PostgreSQL database
API_PORT	3000	Port for the REST API
EDDN_URL	tcp://eddn.edcd.io:9500	EDDN ZeroMQ endpoint
RUST_LOG	—	Log filter, e.g. edcas_server=info

3. Build and run

export DB_USER=edcas
export DB_PASSWORD=edcas

cargo run --release --bin edcas-server

Database migrations

The server runs migrations automatically on startup, tracked in a schema_migrations table so each is applied exactly once. The migration set is embedded into the binary, so deploying a new build is all that's needed to bring a database up to date — no manual SQL.

• crates/edcas-server/schema.sql is migration 0001 (the full canonical schema). It uses CREATE … IF NOT EXISTS, so it also adopts a pre-existing database by creating only the objects that are missing.
• To add a change, drop crates/edcas-server/migrations/NNNN_name.sql and append a (version, include_str!("../migrations/NNNN_name.sql")) entry to the list in crates/edcas-server/src/migrations.rs. Never edit or reorder existing entries — they may already be recorded as applied in production.

Pointing the client at your own server

In the client, go to the Settings tab → set the API URL to your server address, e.g.:

http://localhost:3000

API endpoints

Method	Path	Description
GET	/api/v1/systems/:address	Star system metadata
GET	/api/v1/systems/:address/bodies	All bodies in a system
GET	/api/v1/system-population-history?system_address=&days=	Population history for a system
GET	/api/v1/stations?name=&system_name=&market_id=&limit=	Station search
GET	/api/v1/commodity-price-history?market_id=&commodity=&days=	Commodity price history
GET	/api/v1/carriers?name=&callsign=&system_name=&market_id=&limit=	Fleet carrier search
GET	/api/v1/factions?name=&limit=	Faction search
GET	/api/v1/faction-influence-history?name=&system_address=&days=	Faction (BGS) influence history
GET	/api/v1/construction-depots?name=&system_name=&market_id=&limit=	Construction depot search
POST	/api/v1/construction-depots	Submit construction depot data
GET	/api/v1/trade-routes	Best one-way trade routes
GET	/api/v1/trade-loops	Round-trip trade loops
GET	/api/v1/nearest-commodity?commodity=&reference_system=&limit=	Nearest market for a commodity
POST	/api/v1/nearest-multi-commodity	Nearest market for several commodities
GET	/api/v1/server-tick	Predicted BGS server tick
POST	/api/v1/journal/event	Upload a single journal event
POST	/api/v1/journal/events	Upload a batch of journal events

All responses are JSON.

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Suggestions, Ideas & Bug Reports

Feel free to contact me for feature requests on Discord: frank_the_fish or use the issue tracker.

For bugs, please use the GitHub issues page.