Where does the Engine Launcher keep its' settings, specifically, engine's install locations (on Windows)?

Development Platform & Builds
1

I know of multiple locations where installed engine’s locations are stored, these are:

  1. Default “Program Files/Epic Games/Engines” location
  2. Registry key under HKLM\SOFTWARE\EpicGames\Unreal Engine
  3. Registry key under HKCU\SOFTWARE\Epic Games\Unreal Engine\Builds

After installing 5.2 Engine in a non-default location I noticed that it doesn’t show up in any of the above locations. However, launcher is still aware of it being installed, hence it must store this information somewhere. Where?

2

Hi,

I had a similar issue - I’ve been writing some build scripts and needed to know which versions were installed and where. After a lot of digging around here and a little help from Microsoft’s SysInternal tools (specifically ProcMon: Process Monitor - Sysinternals | Microsoft Learn) I discovered that the launcher reads a LauncherInstalled.dat file located in the windows c:\ProgramData folder.

The ProgramData folder is held in the %ALLUSERSPROFILE% environment variable. The path to the file is %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Epic\UnrealEngineLauncher\LauncherInstalled.dat. The contents of the file is just JSON structured text e.g.

{
	"InstallationList": [
		{
			"InstallLocation": "D:\\Epic Games\\UE_4.27",
			"NamespaceId": "ue",
			"ItemId": "3ddb1bad6e004b99a7192c1a29f2318a",
			"ArtifactId": "UE_4.27",
			"AppVersion": "4.27.2-18319896+++UE4+Release-4.27-2023.1-Windows",
			"AppName": "UE_4.27"
		},
		{
			"InstallLocation": "D:\\Epic Games\\UE_5.0",
			"NamespaceId": "ue",
			"ItemId": "d33c86e1279b45fc9a889f5e64ed6705",
			"ArtifactId": "UE_5.0",
			"AppVersion": "5.0.3-20979098+++UE5+Release-5.0-2023.1-Windows",
			"AppName": "UE_5.0"
		}...

Hope this helps.

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