Install and enable

Where the Chart Engine package goes, why the frontend must be rebuilt before it appears, how to activate the licence, and the two settings that decide which trading screens use it.

6 min readUpdated 3 August 2026install, licence, build, settings

Chart Engine ships as a self-contained frontend package, not as backend routes or database tables. Installing it is three things in a fixed order: put the files on disk, rebuild the frontend so the build notices them, then turn it on per screen. Skip the middle step and nothing changes — the site keeps rendering TradingView and the only clue is a single warning in the browser console.

Before you start

A working Bicrypto install you can rebuild — see Server requirements
Shell access to the app directory; every step here is a command
The Chart Engine purchase code, for licence activation
Enough free RAM to rebuild the frontend (8 GB is comfortable; 4 GB needs swap)

Where the files go

The package lives at exactly one path, and the parentheses are part of it:

frontend/components/(ext)/chart-engine/
├── index.tsx          the component source
├── dist/index.js      the built bundle — this is what the app actually loads
├── package.json       declares main: ./dist/index.js
└── …                  indicators, drawings, renderers, panels

Chart Engine is delivered as a single prebuilt bundle, and pnpm updator replaces that bundle and rebuilds the frontend around it. If you are unpacking a release by hand, extract into the app root so the tree lands under frontend/components/(ext)/chart-engine and not one level deeper.

The package's package.json points main at ./dist/index.js, so editing anything under the addon's source directory changes nothing in the running site until the bundle is rebuilt. A release always ships dist/ pre-built. You only need to rebuild it yourself if you have customised the source:

pnpm build:chart-engine

That runs npm install and tsup inside the addon directory, and must finish before the frontend build, not after.

Install and rebuild

Apply the release. From the app root, with the platform stopped:
```
pnpm updator
```
That single command takes the platform down, checks dependencies, runs the migrations and seeders, rebuilds the frontend and starts everything again. It is the whole install for an existing platform.
Confirm the files landed. The build's detection is a file-existence check, so this is the thing that decides everything downstream:
```
ls frontend/components/\(ext\)/chart-engine/dist/index.js
```
Rebuild the frontend if you unpacked the files by hand. pnpm updator already does this; a manual extraction does not.
```
pnpm build:frontend
pnpm restart
```

Why the rebuild is not optional

next.config.js looks for the addon on disk while it is loading, and turns that one boolean into two things that cannot change at runtime:

NEXT_PUBLIC_HAS_CHART_ENGINE is baked into the client bundle as "true" or "false". The chart switcher reads that constant, not the filesystem.
A module alias redirects every import of @/lib/stubs/chart-engine-stub to the real package. Without the alias those imports resolve to a stub component that renders null and exports nothing.

So a build that ran before the files existed produces a site that can never load the chart, however correct the settings are. The reverse is also true and worth knowing: deleting the addon without rebuilding leaves a bundle that still tries to import it.

Every screen imports the chart from the stub path, which always exists. On an install without Chart Engine the stub answers with a null component, the build succeeds, and each screen falls through to TradingView. That is the designed degradation — you will not see a module-not-found error either way.

Activate the licence

Chart Engine is a licensed extension. Its identity in the platform is the extension name chart_engine and the product id 61364182.

Open Admin → Extension Manager at /admin/system/extension. The screen requires the access.extension permission.
Find Chart Engine in the list and enter your purchase code.
Check the row reports the licence as verified. The chart-provider choices in the settings screens below only appear once it does.

The hourly licence heartbeat handles a revoked or expired result for product 61364182 by rewriting settings, not by showing a banner. It sets binarySettings.display.chartType back to TRADINGVIEW, sets spotChartEngine back to TRADINGVIEW, and clears the settings cache so every process picks the change up immediately.

Traders see TradingView again with no explanation, and an operator who does not know this looks for a chart bug rather than a billing problem. If your charts change provider on their own, check the licence first.

Turn it on, per screen

Installing the addon does not switch any screen over. Each surface has its own setting, and each defaults to TradingView.

Binary trading

Admin → Binary Options → Binary Settings (/admin/finance/binary/settings, permission access.binary.settings). The Chart Engine card only renders when the licence is verified; pick Chart Engine Pro and save.

Which chart the binary trading page mounts

The stored value lives inside the binarySettings JSON row. If that row has never been saved, or the display.chartType key is missing from it, the trade page treats the value as TRADINGVIEW — the safe fallback, because it works whether or not the addon is present.

Spot, futures and the Trading Pro workspace

Admin → Trading Infrastructure → Trading Settings (/admin/trading/settings), under the Chart group.

Chart provider for the spot and futures trading pages

Set it to CHART_ENGINE. This one setting covers the classic trade page and the Trading Pro workspace — the Pro layout mounts the same chart switcher in spot or futures context, so it follows this value.

Bot terminal

Nothing to configure. The bot terminal shipped by Algo Trading Bots always asks for Chart Engine, because TradingView cannot draw a strategy's ladder. If the addon is missing the terminal falls back to TradingView and simply loses the overlays.

Verify the install

Open a trading page you switched over and confirm the chart's own toolbar is present — timeframe buttons, a chart-type picker, and buttons for indicators, alerts, replay, heatmap and fullscreen. TradingView has none of those in that arrangement.
Open the browser console. If you see [ChartSwitcher] Chart Engine addon not installed. Falling back to TradingView., the build did not see the files. Rebuild the frontend.
Add an indicator from the toolbar, reload the page, and confirm it comes back. Indicators persist in the browser, so this proves the whole chart is live and not a stub.
Watch the last candle move. A price that never changes means the historical fetch worked and the WebSocket did not — see Troubleshooting.

Removing it

Delete frontend/components/(ext)/chart-engine, set both settings back to TRADINGVIEW, and rebuild the frontend. Order matters here too: rebuild after the delete, or the bundle keeps an alias pointing at a directory that is gone.

Nothing else needs cleaning up. There are no tables to drop and no cron jobs to disable. User-side state — saved indicators, drawings, templates and favourites — lives in each browser's local storage and simply stops being read.

Admin settings — every switch in one place, including what each one does not cover.
Data sources — the endpoints the chart will start calling once enabled.