Manual Alpaca

This project is meant to manually interact with Alpaca's trading API in order to more easily debug trading algorithms, and also provide a new way to trade.

As a side note, I wanted to learn more about Continuous Integration such as TravisCI and automatic code linting. So I this is going to be my playground for that.

Acknowledgements

The base code for this repository was forked from Matt Haines on 02/26/2019 because I thought it was a cool project, but I wanted to expand on the code and possibly add a GUI or Web interface. I would have made this an actual GitHub fork, but the repo is hosted on BitBucket.

Setup

Python Client

This repository makes use of the Alpaca API's Python client.

Conda Environment

To create a portable/sandboxed conda environment for your python packages, run:

conda env create -f config/environment.yaml
source activate manual_alpaca

Pip

To install the required python packages with pip instead, run:

pip install -r config/requirements.txt

API Keys

You will need API Keys to use the API, see the Alpaca API Documentation for help with generating your API keys.

For now, you can put your API keys in config/secrets.yaml, or you can store the keys in environment variables like so:

 export APCA_API_KEY_ID: <Key ID>
 export APCA_API_SECRET_KEY: <Secret Key>

NOTE: Currently, authenticate(mode='paper' assumes paper-trading by default, so it expects that APCA_API_KEY_ID and APCA_API_SECRET_KEY are your paper-trading keys. If you would like to live trade, make sure that you explicitly choose so with authenticate(mode='live'), and use your live keys instead.

This may change in the future.

Usage

Once you've installed everything and setup your API keys, you're all set! To get started, you can run:

python3 manual_alpaca.py