Calculon

cryptocurrency trading bot using the Coinbase Pro API

Requirements

To run this software you need experience using python and cron, and a server to run the software 24/7.

I am building a web app to make it easy for anyone to use it, coming soon!

Library

cbpro

How to use

Check out this repo

git clone git@github.com:LinuxFan2718/Calculon.git
cd Calculon

Install python libraries

pip install -r requirements.txt

Connect your Coinbase Pro account to the bot

cp .env.example .env

Open .env in a text editor.

Go to the Coinbase Pro API page and generate a key with view, transfer and trade permissions.

Copy the api key, passphrase and api secret into .env.

Do not share these values with anyone or check them into a git repo.

To test your Coinbase Pro API config, run test-auth.py, the output will tell you whether your .env values are working.

python test-auth.py

Buy crypto with USD

You must have a funding method configured in Coinbase Pro

Configure the constants at the top of the file dca.py for the amount and cryptocurrency you want.

Then run the file to buy.

python dca.py

I recommended setting up this file to run using cron every week or month to take advantage of dollar cost averaging.

Using cron to autobuy

First, ssh into your server.

As your user, pull down the git repo, and create the .env file on your server in the repo.

I had to specify the full path when loading the env file, so edit the source code like this. (My user on this server is named ethereum, this used to be a ethereum node server.)

-config = dotenv_values(".env")  # config = {"USER": "foo", "EMAIL": "foo@example.org"}
+config = dotenv_values("/home/ethereum/Calculon/.env")  # config = {"USER": "foo", "EMAIL": "foo@example.org"}

You'll need to create a shell script that runs the python script. Mine looks like this, named dailybuy.sh

#!/bin/bash

/home/ethereum/.pyenv/shims/python /home/ethereum/Calculon/dca.py

As you can see, I installed pyenv on my server. However you install python, make a shell script using full paths for python and the source code file.

For this part, I recommend making the above changes to test-auth.py and created a dailytest.sh script to run it, so you can test your cron setup.

To edit cron, don't try to edit /etc/crontab as root. Instead, as your regular user, run crontab -e. Add a line like this

* * * * * /home/ethereum/Calculon/dailytest.sh >> /home/ethereum/cron.log 2>&1

No need to send SIGHUP to the cron service. Just save your changes, then run

tail -f ~/cron.log

Fix any errors you see, this setup will test your credentials every single minute of every day, so once it works, comment out that line.

Now add a line to crontab running your daily buy, set the time to once a day, and watch it happen by tail -f your cron log file, and in the Coinbase Pro interface!

For example,

50 5 * * * /home/ethereum/Calculon/dailybuy.sh >> /home/ethereum/cron.log 2>&1

Does a daily buy at 5:50am UTC. Check your cron timezone with

cat /etc/localtime

Also useful is

date

Question: How do you save money buying ETH with Calculon?

Answer: For some reason, Coinbase charges a much higher fee when you buy using www.coinbase.com vs. using Coinbase Pro. You can get the lower price using pro.coinbase.com, or using their API with a bot like this one.

Fee advantage

On Sat, May 29 at 5:25pm ET I executed a $100 ETH buy using this dca script.

Coinbase Pro buy

0.04435264 ETH

Coinbase UI buy

0.0430622 ETH

Difference

0.00129044 ETH which is $2.89

How to set up roberto

Create a separate "Portfolio" in the Coinbase Pro web console and fund it with USD and the desired token to trade.

Create an API key in the new Portfolio without transfer permission.

Add the API key to .env in this directory, in the keys starting with BEGINNER. (See the roberto.py source code if a hint is needed.)

Edit the constants at the top of roberto.py

Run roberto.py to set up limit orders for 10 dollars worth of ETH with a 5 percent separation (buy low, sell high), and keep 0 percent of profits in fiat

python roberto.py ETH-USD 10 5 0

You should see some info printed to the terminal.
The program will ask for confirmation to set the orders unless you set the --yes flag.

How to set up cron_roberto

On Mac, I used crontab -e to set up a cron job which looks like

* * * * * cd ~/Git/Calculon/ && /anaconda3/envs/calculon/bin/python cron_roberto.py ETH-USD 1000 5 100

The first command just changes the directory to where the API key is, the second calls cron_roberto.py which will check if any orders have executed, and if they have, set up a new pair using roberto.set_limit_orders().

You can also run directly from the command line like

python cron_roberto.py ETH-USD 10 5 100