What Is Elite Dangerous Market Connector?

Elite Dangerous Market Connector ("EDMC") is a third-party application for use with Frontier Developments' ("Frontier") game "Elite Dangerous" ("the game"). Its purpose is to facilitate supplying certain game data to, and in some cases retrieving it from, a number of websites and other tools.

To do this it utilises the Journal Files written by the game when played on a PC. It also makes use of Frontier's Companion API ("Frontier's CAPI"), accessible once you've authorised this application.

Find out more on the EDMC Wiki.

Pre-Release 4.2.0-beta1​

NB: This contains further work on top of 4.1.7-rc1. Due to the major change in how multiple-instance checking is done we felt the need to bump the minor version.
There is a major change in this release with respect to how the main application checks if there is already another instance running.
For most users things will operate no differently, although note that the multiple instance check does now apply to platforms other than Windows.
For anyone wanting to run multiple instances of the program this is now possible via:

runas /user:OTHERUSER <path to>EDMarketConnector.exe –force-localserver-for-auth

The old check was based solely on there being a window present with the title we expect. This prevented using runas /user:SOMEUSER … to run a second copy of the application, as the resulting window would still be within the same desktop environment and thus be found in the check.
The new method does assume that the Journals directory is writable by the user we're running as. This might not be true in the case of sharing the file system to another host in a read-only manner. If we fail to open the lock file read-write then the application aborts the checks and will simply continue running as normal.

Note that any single instance of EDMarketConnector.exe will still only monitor and act upon the latest Journal file in the configured location. If you run Elite Dangerous for another Commander then the application will want to start monitoring that separate Commander. See wiki:Troubleshooting#i-run-two-instances-of-ed-simultaneously-but-i-cant-run-two-instances-of-edmc which will be updated when this change is in a full release.

• Changes the "is there another process already running?" check to be based on a lockfile in the configured Journals directory. The name of this file is edmc-journal-lock.txt and upon successful locking it will contain text like:
  Path: <configured path to your Journals>
  PID: <process ID of the application>

  The lock will be released and applied to the new directory if you change it via Settings > Configuration. If the new location is already locked you'll get a 'Retry/Ignore?' pop-up.

• Adds the command-line argument –force-localserver-for-auth. This forces using a local webserver for the Frontier Auth callback. This should be used when running multiple instances of the application for all instances else there's no guarantee of the edmc:// protocol callback reaching the correct process and Frontier Auth will fail.

• Adds Steam and Epic to the list of "audiences" in the Frontier Auth callout so that you can authorise using those accounts, rather than their associated Frontier Account details.

• Adds the command-line argument –suppress-dupe-process-popup to exit without showing the warning popup in the case that EDMarketConnector found another process already running.
  This can be useful if wanting to blindly run both EDMC and the game from a batch file or similar.