EVE Trade Tools Price Helper

A WordPress plugin that imports EVE Online static data from the official EVE Static Data Export (SDE) and pulls live market prices from ESI into an external MySQL database, making that data available to other plugins without requiring repeated ESI calls.

Part of the EVE Trade Tools suite. This is the base plugin — other ETT plugins depend on it for database access, SSO credentials, and the shared admin page.

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Features

• SDE static data import — uploads and imports the official EVE SDE ZIP from developers.eveonline.com, populating market groups, item types, meta groups, meta types, manufacturing outputs, reprocessing materials, and solar system data into the external database. Import runs as six sequential AJAX calls (one YAML file each) with a live progress bar and per-table row counts
• Hub price pulls — fetches buy/sell orders from ESI for up to five NPC trade hubs; prices are upserted in-place rather than wiped, so consumers always have data
• Private trade hubs — configure one or more private market structures (alliance citadels, Upwell structures) as additional trade hubs, each with independent character authentication and structure selection
• Structure price support — optional secondary and tertiary player structure per NPC hub, fetched via EVE SSO; 401/403 responses are skipped cleanly rather than retried
• Adjusted prices — fetches CCP's adjusted price list from ESI after each hub run and stores it for use in reprocessing tax calculations
• Market history — fetches 30-day rolling average daily volume per type per region via parallel ESI requests; hubs sharing a region are deduplicated and fetched once
• System cron runner — jobs are driven by an external cron service pinging /?ett_ph_run=TOKEN each minute; each ping works for the full PHP execution window before saving state and resuming on the next ping
• Configurable scheduler — set a daily start time and repeat frequency (1–168 hours); pause and resume without losing settings
• Manual job control — start, monitor, and cancel jobs from the admin page with live progress updates
• Job history — completed jobs retained for 90 days with full progress and error detail
• ESI error handling — rate limit backoff (HTTP 429/420) with Retry-After support; transient errors retry after 5 seconds
• Changelog tab — automatically detects all active ETT plugins and renders their changelogs with GitHub links on a dedicated admin tab
• Tab framework — exposes ETT_Admin::register_tab() so other ETT plugins can add their own tabs to the shared admin page
• Encrypted credential storage — SSO Client Secret and database password stored using AES-256-CBC with HMAC-SHA256, keyed from WordPress secret constants

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Requirements

Requirement	Version
WordPress	6.0 or later
PHP	8.0 or later
PHP extension	zip (required for SDE import)
PHP extension	curl (required for parallel history fetching)
External MySQL database	Separate from the WordPress database

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Installation

1. Upload ett-price-helper to /wp-content/plugins/ and activate it
2. Navigate to WP Admin → EVE Trade Tools
3. Follow the setup steps below

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Initial Setup

1. Configure the external database

Enter the host, port, database name, username, and password for a MySQL database separate from your WordPress database. Test and save the connection. The plugin creates and manages its own tables — the database should be dedicated to ETT data.

Once the connection is confirmed, the SDE import options appear immediately in the EVE SDE Import card without requiring a page refresh.

2. Run the SDE import

Download the EVE Static Data Export ZIP from developers.eveonline.com/static-data (~40 MB compressed), then use one of the two import options:

Option A — Upload ZIP: Upload the ZIP directly via the browser. Requires upload_max_filesize and post_max_size in php.ini to permit files of at least 50 MB.

Option B — Server-side path: If your host imposes strict upload limits, place the ZIP on the server via SSH or FTP and enter its absolute path (e.g. /home/user/sde.zip).

The import runs as six sequential AJAX calls. A progress bar and step log update live as each file is processed:

File	Table(s) populated	Required
marketGroups.yaml	ett_invMarketGroups	Yes
metaGroups.yaml	ett_invMetaGroups	Yes
types.yaml	ett_invTypes, ett_invMetaTypes	Yes
typeMaterials.yaml	ett_invTypeMaterials	Yes
blueprints.yaml	ett_industryActivityProducts	Yes
mapSolarSystems.yaml	ett_mapSolarSystems	No

mapSolarSystems.yaml is optional — if absent from the ZIP the other five files still import normally. It is required for private hub system name autocomplete and canonical in-game name display. All files are located by basename so any internal ZIP structure is handled automatically. No PHP YAML extension is required — the importer uses custom streaming line-by-line parsers.

The Market Groups card populates automatically when the import completes. Re-run this import whenever CCP releases an updated SDE.

3. Select market groups and generate type IDs

Choose the market groups you want to track, then click Generate TypeIDs. This builds the ett_selected_typeids table used by subsequent price pulls. Re-run this any time you change your market group selection.

4. Select trade hubs

Choose one or more NPC trade hubs. Prices will be fetched for the specific station at each selected hub. You may deselect all standard hubs if you intend to run with private hubs only.

Supported hubs:

Key	Station
jita	Jita IV - Moon 4 - Caldari Navy Assembly Plant
amarr	Amarr VIII (Oris) - Emperor Family Academy
rens	Rens VI - Moon 8 - Brutor Tribe Treasury
dodixie	Dodixie IX - Moon 20 - Federation Navy Assembly Plant
hek	Hek VIII - Moon 12 - Boundless Creation Factory

5. (Optional) Configure player structures

For each NPC hub you can optionally configure a secondary and tertiary player structure. Structure orders are fetched using EVE SSO and appended to the hub's price data after the NPC station orders are processed.

To enable structure access, connect an EVE character under the EVE SSO card with the esi-markets.structure_markets.v1 scope.

6. (Optional) Configure private trade hubs

Private trade hubs let you pull market data from structures in any system — useful for alliance citadels or private markets not covered by the standard five hubs.

For each private hub:

1. Select the Market Character — either the primary SSO character or a separate private character (authenticated independently under this card). Use a separate character if the primary is not permitted to dock in the target structure.
2. Enter a System Name — autocomplete is powered by ett_mapSolarSystems and shows canonical in-game names and region as you type (requires mapSolarSystems.yaml to have been imported).
3. Click Fetch Structures to retrieve all structures in that system accessible to the selected character.
4. Check the structures you want to include in the price pull.
5. Click Save Hub.

Multiple private hubs are supported; each can be independently added or removed. Private hub prices appear in ett_prices under the system name as the hub key (e.g. c-n4od) and are automatically available to other ETT plugins such as ETT Reprocess Trading.

7. Configure the schedule and external cron

Set a daily start time (uses the WordPress site timezone) and a repeat frequency in hours. Use the Pause / Resume button to suspend scheduled runs without clearing your settings — in-progress jobs always complete normally.

Scheduled runs require an external cron service. The plugin does not use WP-Cron. Configure your cron service to send a request to the runner URL every minute:

https://your-site.com/?ett_ph_run=TOKEN

The full URL including the token is shown in the Schedule tab. Each ping processes work for the full PHP execution window before saving state; a 10–20 minute run completes across a handful of pings with no PHP timeout risk.

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Job Types

All jobs run via the same tick-based execution model. Each tick processes up to a configurable number of ESI pages within a configurable time budget, then saves state and yields until the next cron ping.

typeids

Reads the selected market groups from WordPress options and rebuilds ett_selected_typeids in the external database. Completes in a single tick.

prices

Phases:

1. hub — fetches region orders from ESI page by page for each selected hub (primary NPC station, then optional secondary and tertiary structures, then any configured private hubs)
2. adjusted — fetches CCP's full adjusted price list from GET /markets/prices/ and upserts results into ett_adjusted_prices

Prices are written via INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE — rows are overwritten in-place rather than the table being wiped. Rows for types that return no orders in a run retain their previous values; the fetched_at timestamp on each row indicates when it was last updated.

A history job is created and queued automatically when a prices job completes successfully.

history

Fetches 30-day rolling average daily volume per type per region using parallel curl_multi requests to GET /markets/{region_id}/history/. Requests are sent in sub-groups with a 500 ms gap between bursts to avoid ESI rate limits; if the X-Esi-Error-Limit-Remain header drops below 10, remaining items are skipped and a 60-second backoff is triggered. Results are upserted into ett_market_history. Hubs sharing a region are deduplicated — the region is fetched once. Private hub regions are included automatically based on the system's region ID.

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Performance Settings

Setting	Default	Range	Description
Max pages per tick	5	1–50	ESI pages processed per cron tick or browser step
Max seconds per tick	25	1–25	Wall-clock time budget per tick
History fetch concurrency	5	1–20	Type IDs fetched in parallel per history tick

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External Database Tables

All tables are created automatically by ensure_schema() on first job run.

Table	Populated by	Content
ett_invMarketGroups	SDE import	Market group hierarchy
ett_invTypes	SDE import	Item names, market group, portionSize
ett_invMetaGroups	SDE import	Meta group names
ett_invMetaTypes	SDE import	Per-item meta group assignment
ett_industryActivityProducts	SDE import	Blueprint-manufacturable type IDs
ett_invTypeMaterials	SDE import	Reprocessing materials and quantities per batch
ett_mapSolarSystems	SDE import (optional)	Solar system IDs, canonical names, and region IDs
ett_selected_typeids	Generate TypeIDs	Active type ID list with meta tier
ett_prices	Prices job	Best buy/sell per type per hub with volumes
ett_market_history	History job	30-day average daily volume per type per hub
ett_adjusted_prices	Prices job	CCP adjusted and average prices per type
ett_jobs	All jobs	Job records with status, progress, and error detail

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Tab Framework

Other ETT plugins can add tabs to the shared admin page by hooking into ett_admin_tabs and calling:

ETT_Admin::register_tab('my-tab', 'My Tab Label', function () {
    // render tab content
});

This hook fires on the EVE Trade Tools admin page before tabs are rendered. A Changelog tab is always added last by Price Helper itself, automatically detecting all active ett-* plugins and rendering their changelogs.

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Data Storage

WordPress options (selected)

Option	Content
ett_extdb_settings	External DB connection settings (password AES-256-CBC encrypted)
ett_sde_last_import_meta	Timestamp and row counts from the last SDE import
ett_selected_market_groups	Selected market group IDs
ett_selected_hubs	Selected hub keys
ett_secondary_structures / ett_tertiary_structures	Structure IDs per NPC hub
ett_private_hubs	Private hub configurations (system, region, structures, char source)
ett_priv_access_{N} / ett_priv_refresh_{N} + IV/MAC	Per-private-hub SSO tokens (encrypted)
ett_priv_expires_{N}	Per-private-hub token expiry timestamp
ett_priv_char_id_{N} / ett_priv_char_name_{N}	Per-private-hub authenticated character
ett_sso_client_id / ett_sso_client_secret + IV/MAC	EVE SSO application credentials
ett_sso_access_token / ett_sso_refresh_token + IV/MAC	Primary SSO tokens (encrypted)
ett_sched_start_time / ett_sched_freq_hours	Scheduler config
ett_sched_enabled	Scheduler pause/resume state
ett_ph_runner_token	System-cron secret token
ett_batch_max_pages / ett_batch_max_seconds	Tick performance limits
ett_history_batch_size	History parallel fetch concurrency
ett_ph_cron_prices_job_id / ett_ph_cron_history_job_id	Active cron job IDs

On uninstall

All WordPress options listed above are deleted, including all per-private-hub token options for indices 1–20. The external database and all price data within it are never touched by uninstall.

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Encryption

Database password and SSO credentials are stored encrypted using AES-256-CBC with a per-value random IV and an HMAC-SHA256 MAC, with keys derived from WordPress's AUTH_KEY and SECURE_AUTH_KEY constants. Other ETT plugins that need to read these credentials use the ETT_Crypto class directly, and the encryption scheme is shared across the suite so values are portable between plugins without migration.

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Production Notes

• Configure an external cron service to ping /?ett_ph_run=TOKEN every minute — the URL and token are shown in the Schedule tab
• The external database should be dedicated to ETT data — the plugin does not modify or clean up external DB tables on uninstall
• Re-run the SDE import whenever CCP releases an updated Static Data Export; include mapSolarSystems.yaml in the ZIP for private hub support
• Re-run Generate TypeIDs after changing market group selection or after an SDE import
• The zip PHP extension must be available for the SDE import to function
• Uploaded ZIPs are stored temporarily in uploads/ett-price-helper/sde-tmp/ during import and deleted automatically on completion or failure; the directory is blocked from web access via .htaccess
• Job records are pruned after 90 days
• Private hub characters must have docking access to the target structures; ESI returns 401/403 for inaccessible structures and the plugin skips them cleanly

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License

GPLv2 or later — see LICENSE

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EVE Online and ESI are the property of CCP Games. This project is not affiliated with CCP Games.