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How to Create Cryptocurrency Charts with Python and CoinAPI: A Step-by-Step Guide for Developers

How to Create Interactive Cryptocurrency Charts with Python and CoinAPI: A Step-by-Step Guide for Developers

Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a Python library that provides a lightweight and interactive charting solution for data visualization using CoinAPI data. This tutorial is dedicated to developers who want to build interactive cryptocurrency charts with Python and CoinAPI.

Step 1: Set Up Your Project

Start by setting up a new Python project. Create a directory for your library and navigate to it in your terminal or command prompt.

Step 2: Install Dependencies

To begin, you’ll need to install the necessary dependencies. In this case, you’ll need requests for making HTTP requests and a charting library such as Plotly or Matplotlib for data visualization. Install them using pip:

 

Step 3: Create the CoinAPI Wrapper

Next, create a file named coinapi.py and define a class called CoinAPI that will serve as the wrapper for CoinAPI’s RESTful API. Import the required modules:

 

In the CoinAPI class, define methods for accessing the CoinAPI endpoints to fetch the desired cryptocurrency data. For example, you can create a method to retrieve the historical prices of a specific cryptocurrency:

 

This example uses the requests library to make an HTTP GET request to the CoinAPI endpoint and retrieves the historical price data for a specific cryptocurrency symbol (symbol) within a given date range (start_date and end_date).

Step 4: Implement Chart Generation

Create a separate file named charting.py to handle the chart generation. Import the necessary charting library:

Define a function that takes the fetched cryptocurrency data and generates an interactive chart. Here’s an example using Plotly:

 

This function takes the fetched data and extracts the relevant data points, such as the timestamp (time_period_start) and the closing price (price_close). It then uses Plotly to create a line chart, setting the appropriate x-axis and y-axis labels.

Step 5: Put It All Together

Create a main.py file to demonstrate the usage of your library. In this file, import both the coinapi and charting modules:

 

Instantiate the CoinAPI class by providing your CoinAPI key:

Fetch the desired cryptocurrency data using the get_historical_prices method:

Interactive cryptocurrency charts with Python and CoinAPI

Here’s an example of how you can use the library to fetch historical price data from CoinAPI and generate a chart using Plotly:

 

In the above example, you import the CoinAPI class and the charting module. After instantiating the CoinAPI class with your API key, you call the get_historical_prices method to fetch the historical price data for Bitcoin (BTC) within a specified date range.

Once you have the data, you can pass it to the generate_chart function from the charting module to generate an interactive chart using Plotly.

Remember to replace 'YOUR_API_KEY' it with your actual CoinAPI key. Have a look at our documentation for more instructions.

This example demonstrates a basic usage scenario, and you can further customize the chart by exploring the features and options provided by the Plotly library.

More to read: 

How to deploy a currency alerting pipeline with Quix and CoinAPI
What’s better: building API or buying one?