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Intro to the Eve Stable Infrastructure (ESI)

Using the ESI and other EVE related APIs

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Class Rules

Feel free to ask questions in:��
Re-enable “push-to-talk” or mute yourself in the Classroom Voice Activation group from Auth
Recording the class is only permitted if all participants are informed about it and have agreed to being recorded.
Stay safe during the class (usually docked-up is preferred).�

Text	Click speech bubble in top right of Discord classroom channel Preface your questions with “Q” e.g.: “Q: What are bookmarks?”
Voice	Whenever there are open comms �(usually at the end of class during Q&A session).

Questions in Chat (Chat bubble next to the voice channel)
Can key up if you want during open comms

If you find yourself perma-muted, then you need to set a Push to Talk key

If you have the ‘Classroom Voice Activation’ Group in Auth, then please either re-enable Push To Talk or mute yourself to prevent hot micing
Recording is only permitted if everyone is informed about it and have agreed to be recorded

Teacher Note: Say either you are not or you are recording at this time

It’s recommended you stay docked up during the class

Teacher Note: This class can have a practical - if you are running the practical, then:

We will have a practical on some of these techniques when the lecture is done - I am currently in [System Name] and if you would like to join me there you can participate, but you don’t need to be in the same system for this practical

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What is this class about?

What will we talk about?

The ESI - Eve Stable Infrastructure�
Tools that use it, such as the official EVE Excel Plugin�
3rd Party apps and data sources that are used side by side with the ESI

What should you know?

Have at least a basic understanding of programming. �
Have a basic understanding of RESTful API’s and JSON payloads�
Have a desire to build your own tools

Take Note!

The ESI used to be called the “Eve Swagger Interface” but was moved off Swagger to OpenAPI in 2025

What is this class about?�

We’ll talk about the Eve Stable Infrastructure - the ESI - and how to use it
We’ll do this by first starting with the official Eve Excel Plugin
And we’ll show a little bit about how you can use additional sites to refine your calls to the ESI or to get information they’ve already gathered and condensed

What should you know?

It would be helpful for you to have the following things:

A basic understanding of programming. The examples that will be provided along side this class in a public Git are in Python, but any language can access the ESI
Having at least a basic understanding of what an API is and what a JSON based payload would look like. I mention RESTful though the ESI is not a true RESTful api, it follows some similar practices.
And most importantly, a desire to build your own tools.

A note - If you do googling you may find references to the Eve *Swagger Interface* - this was the name for the ESI before they switched from the Swagger framework for APIs to OpenAPI - which is a successor to

Swagger. In general, most endpoints remained the same just the framework behind it updated.

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What won’t this class cover?

How to program�
It will barely scratch the surface of what’s possible through the ESI�
How to use Excel in general

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EVE Excel Plugin

This official Plugin for Microsoft Office Excel will give you direct interaction in your spreadsheets to the ESI and every bit of information it can pull�
First - you need to use Microsoft Excel - there are Google Sheet libraries that can do some of this, but they are not always well maintained.�( You can use the GESI to do this on google sheets!)�
Second - follow the instructions on how to install the plugin here:�https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/8165207770524-EVE-Online-Excel-Add-in

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Now its time to demo this a bit!��Teacher Note: You can explain the demo using the slide - but it will be better to switch to Excel and show off the plugin directly.��Here i Have a sheet, ive already set up the plugin.

You can click on the plugin here and get a full range of all the possible “functions” that could be called.

If for example i want information on the Astero, i know the ID number of the astero already is 33468 - so i will type in `=EVEONLINE.TYPE(33468, TRUE)`

You can also go and scroll through the list of functions in the plugin information, find .type

We run that, and get the Astero. You can see this little menu pop up when you mouse over it. YOu can select any one of these - say Description and it will populate the next cell with that information

If you look in that cell, you see it says =A1.description - its pulling an attribute from the information stored in the response from the call.

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Authing your access through a toon

In Excel, we add a character here and go through the process of logging in. This is using the OAuth2 system on CCP’s servers directly - your information is *never* consumed by the 3rd party app in this manner, the login and credential requests are served by and return directly to CCP.

Logging in gives you access to many more functions - and if there is something your character has access to in game, like corp information, you can access it through these functions as well

Next, we’ll dig into some more juicy information. Anything that is private to your character - ie anything that isnt general public knowledge - you have to Auth to get access too.

You can log in with the ‘Add a Character’ button.

This uses OAuth2 procedures to log you in - all sites and tools that ask you to log in your character are using this Oauth2 method and it is one of the safest methods of allowing 3rd party sites to give access to people without knowing their official credentials.

When you click log in/add a character, you’re actually being sent to the CCP servers. They will serve up the login page, get your credentials, and give back a token that validates further calls from the app. If you ever want to revoke this access for any reason, you can go to your account page and revoke tokens - it will revoke ALL tokens, so you’ll end up revoking access everywhere youve logged in.

Logging in gives you access to almost all information your character has access to. You can see your eve mails, your skill queues, your assets. If you have corp access you can read information that the corp has available - like corp wallets or assets in corp hangers.

�With logged in information you can do things like get all your characters skills. You can get your skill queue. You can find out what assets you have in what locations and see if its worth moving them around. You can get close to real time market data on said items and see if its worth selling them. ��The possibilities are gigantic and it takes simply wanting to build something to figure out what you can do.

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The EVE Stable Infrastructure

OpenAPI is a framework for generating endpoints and required body formats quickly and effectively, and making it reactive to changes in data structures on the back end (through version changes in the user side)�
The ESI is a set of mostly read only endpoints that can pull information directly from EVE. This information is usually slightly out of date, around an hour for most things though it can be cached for up to 24 in some situations.�
The functions that we showed off in Excel are just shortcuts for calling these exact endpoints!�
Find the ESI documents at https://developers.eveonline.com/api-explorer �
Set up a Developer App

But that’s all Excel. Its handy and all, but it’s got some serious limitations when it comes to working with big amount of data. Or maybe it just doesn’t fit for what you want to do.��The Excel plugin is basically a 1:1 wrapper around the ESI - the Eve Stable Infrastructure.

Swagger is a framework for generating endpoints and requirements/response formats in an easily digestible way, and in a way that can allow code to automatically generate response reception models and save a lot of the grunt work. It also can be updated very easily, making end points easier to maintain by devs over at CCP.

Most of the ESI is read only, and most of it slightly out of date information - if you’re interested, go look up more on Eve Carbon and their asynchronous event bus system they developed to remove a load of non important data management and requests functionality from the main eve servers onto a side system that can operate independently and wouldn’t affect your ability to shoot other ships.

You can find the ESI documents at https://developers.eveonline.com/api-explorer

From this page you can even test out the end points, give them requests and get an idea of what the return would look like.

If all you are going to do is access the public endpoints then you’re good to go. But if you want to get access to the authorization only endpoints, you need to set up a developer app.

We’ll go into that in a bit.

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Data Structure return

ID Numbers - everything in eve has an ID number, from every module type to every character, corporation, and more.�
The ESI will most often just return or request ID numbers, so you have to know how to convert them.�
The ESI end points of universe/ids and universe/names are the end points that can convert from names to id and id to names respectively. �
Alternatively, for things that don’t change (ships, modules, ect) you have the SDE

Data is returned in JSON format from the ESI. Depending on your language you will have to marshal/serialize it into an appropriate data structure in your code.

Once you’ve done so its a matter of parsing the data for what you want to do with it!��The ESI is somewhat Restful, though not in a traditional sense - but everything is represented with ID numbers. Evertyhign from every ship and module type to every character, corporation, station, ect have a unique ID number.

So while the ESI wont directly give you the restful link to follow, you can construct it yourself and call another endpoint to get more information.

For example. If i call my character information it will say corp : some id number. Id have to call the ESI again to figure out the name of the corp.

There are two handy endpoints for this - universe/ids and universe/names - they translate Names to ID and ID to Names respectfully.

So that Astero from the beginning? I said i already know what it was, but now i can pull up information about the Astero, ect ect. Alternatively, if i wanted to call the ESI for the Astero but didnt know its ID number, i could call universe/ids and give it “Astero” and it would give me back anything it found useful…

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Developer App

App Token (SECRET)�
App return URL�
Scopes�
Create a developer app here: https://developers.eveonline.com/

If all you want to do is access the public end points then you dont need anything other than the endpoint url and the information you want to get out of it.

IF you want to ask people using your app (or even just yourself) to login, you need a Developer App. This is registering your intent with CCP so that they can verify requests coming from your app a) go back to the app and not a shady 3rd party trying to steal your info and b) can track what apps are calling what.

�You set up the developer app at the developer portal �

Create Developer App here:�https://developers.eveonline.com/

The two important parts of this are the return url and the token��Keep your token secret, dont hard code it into your apps or put it in your git repo. Any request to the ESI could use your token and pretend to be your app. Not a good thing.��The second is the return url. This is part of the OAuth2 process - since you have to leave the site/app you were at to go to CCP servers to authenticate, it needs to know where to send you back - and more importantly it needs to do so in as safe a manner as possible, not giving your token to some random man in the middle types who would snag it.

Finally there are also Scopes. You select which scopes you will need - a scope directly corresponds to the various end points listed on the ESI page that are noted as needing authorization. You should only select the scopes you really need, if you plan on letting others use your app.

You see these scopes everytime you log in to an app - it tells you what the app will be allowed to access. You can look across this and go “wait this is an industry tool, why is it asking for access to my eve mails?” and decide not to go forward with authorizing the app.

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Other Data Sources and APIs

SDE - Static Data Export (Fuzzworks)�
Eve-ref.net�
Zkillboard/api, Janice, EveWho, and many more

SDE The Static Data Export - can be downloaded here: https://developers.eveonline.com/resource
Its a collection of yaml files of static data - id numbers to names, dogma attributes, and much more. It can be nice to include some of this information in your apps to reduce the amount of esi calls you might have to make.
At first its a big jumble because everything is in ID numbers and you have to reference dozens of things to make it easier to understand.
Alternatively… you can download a database version from fuzzworks - such as SQL - and be able to run SQL queries on the static data. This is also super useful if you want to prevent calling the ESI unnecessarily. For example, you could call the ESI to get the jump gates in a system. Or you could reference the SDE.
There is also EveRef.net - this is a website version of the SDE that is combining the SDE, information only in the ESI, and other things such as market data to create a pretty comprehensive picture of any in game item or npc.
Most 3rd party websites also have APIs you can access. You can pull killmail snippets - basically the cost and the killmail id and hash - from z kill’s api. You can do this for large groups of kms - such as all the KMs in a specific system in the last 30 days.
Janice has an API, though you need to request a token to access it - you can make appraisals through janice entirely in code. Eve ref has one, as does evewho, dotlan, and more.

Most of this data that these 3rd party sites offer you could get yourself- zkill is just getting killmails from anyone whose given a token and combining them into one big database. Janice is using current market data combed every 30 minutes or so to generate its prices. You could do all this as well, but these sites often have much more data available than you would be able to easily gather yourself but why repeat the work?

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A Brief mention of Dogma

Dogma is the various effects and mechanics an item exerts on the world. �
Understanding Dogma is only needed if you want to get into some nitty gritty of simulation (like Pyfa) of the space pixel game we play�
You can get Dogma information through both the SDE and the ESI

Lets take a look at that Astero again.��Here we have the Dogma of the Astero. You can see when it expands in Excel, it lists all the names. This is really nice. But in reality, in the SDE and the ESI … you’d just get back a number.

Like take Power Grid Output - the total powergrid available. This is Dogma 11 - wherever you see Dogma and an ID of 11, this is referring to the total powergrid.

You can see if we select “value” here you get 32 - and an Astero has 32 power grid to play with.

This also goes for things like role bonuses. The Astero gets an Analyzer Virus Strength bonus of 10 - thats Dogma number 1918 and the value is 10. Whenever the game is dealing with determining your Virus Strength, it will check your ship, modules, implants, drugs, ect for Dogma 1918 - and if it finds it, it will adjust your virus strength accordingly.

Unless you’re trying to write a comparison or simulation app, you probably wont need to mess too much with dogma.

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Typical Public ESI Request Flow

Need Information on something
Get ID of something related (From SDE, from EveRef, from a universe/id call)
Call the appropriate endpoint.
If the endpoint is public, serialize the data into your code objects and do as you need.
Repeat calls as necessary
Retrieve information, serialize, and process

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Some coding resources

EsiPy - a python swagger ESI library - https://github.com/TargetedEntropy/EsiPy �
DjangoESI for Django Apps (Alliance Auth)�
Data Dumps of Market History, Killmails from zkill, and others - available places like fuzzworks and eve-ref�
An example app can be found at: https://github.com/lynkfox/eve_esi_example_app

You don’t have to do everything from scratch. There are libraries and other resources to help. A lot of 3rd party tools are written in python, but the ESI is swagger based so in theory if you know how you can use swagger to generate appropriate data structures for you.

You can also use EsiPy which is doing the same thing, its just already been refined for you. It hasnt been updated in a while, but the ESI doesn’t change much either. Its also swagger based, so it kinda updates naturally on its own.

If you are interested in developing corp based tools, much of the corporations out there use Alliance Auth - which is based on Django. There is DjangoESI specifically for helping Django Apps access the ESI.

I already mentioned but i will do so again, the fuzzworks SDE conversions to SQL databases. It really helps to be able to do an SQL query and get all the relevant info cause you can join several tables together - without it youd have to reference multiple yaml files to make sense of it all

Eve-ref and fuzzworks both have market data dumps, and there are also zkill data dumps as well, giving you access to a wealth of information if you want to get it.

And the example app can be found at: https://github.com/lynkfox/eve_esi_example_app