Create cryptocurrency charts with Python and CoinAPI
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.
How to set cryptocurrency charts with Python and CoinAPII: A step-by-step guide for developers
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
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:
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
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