I’m looking for advice on configuring two fully isolated NinjaTrader environments on a single VPS:
Development/Testing: For strategy backtesting and simulation (no live trades).
Production: For live trading only (no accidental test runs).
Currently, it seems the only option is a single NinjaTrader installation with manual connection switching between Live and Simulated modes—but I’m concerned about:
Accidental live trades from misconfigured strategies.
Mixing logs/charts/data between environments.
Ideal Solution:
Separate installations or sandboxed instances.
Completely segregated files (trades, logs, charts) and logins.
Has anyone achieved this? Are there workarounds (e.g., VM, scripts, NinjaTrader settings)? Appreciate any insights or best practices!
I think Ninja can only have a single instance running at a time. If you want fully isolated environments then you can possibly have nested virtualizations by spinning up a VM within that VPS. However, that’ll eat up a lot of resources too. If you are that concerned about it being fully isolated then just have two VPS. Another workaround option, assuming you created the strategy, when you load it, just select which account uses it. For extra protection, you can add a guard in the code to only allow a certain account for trading it.
On just one single instance of a windows operating system! Doubtful!
Although believe NT allows running Desktop (DT) & Web simultaneously.
NT DT doesn’t allow more than one instance to be run at any given time.
Nor does NT support changing the installed UserDataDir folder location.
(C:\Users\user\Documents\NinjaTrader 8 … \user\OneDrive\Documents)
While you can get around UserDataDir, your just asking for headaches.
And this also would only allow running one instance of NT at a time.
Windows running a VM works, but pretty much only when editing scripts.
VMs normally won’t have enough resources for backtests or heavy tasks.
Regretfully, believe your going to need 2 separate Windows instances.
Both equipped with enough resources to accomplish your required tasks.
Your strategy probably requires, I’m assuuming here, going taking one position in one instance and taking another position in the other instnace on the same instrument. Consider using your desktop version and the ninjatrader web version as your second instance.
My strategy does not need two instances.
I need two instances - one where I can develop and test. Another one is Production where I run live trades.
The logs, charts etc should be different.
