Cointrol

Cointrol is a Bitcoin trading bot and real-time dashboard for Bitstamp.

Cointrol was created to automate Bitcoin speculation. Besides automated trading based on price change triggers and various trading strategies, it also provides a dashboard for your Bitstamp account where you can see all your orders and transactions real-time updated (something Bitstamp lacks).

Even though the original idea was to perhaps provide a fully-fledged hosted service, the system remained quite basic as it has only been used by its creator for a period of time in the winter of '13/'14 (when BTC price fluctuations were pretty insane). Some of the obvious limitations—all of which could easily be addressed—are:

• Only basic trading strategies are implemented
• Single user/Bitstamp account is supported
• Only one active trading session at a time
• The whole account value is used when trading
• Django admin is used for auth and trading strategy/session manipulations

Even though Cointrol has been used for real transactions, no guarantees are provided in terms of security, correctness, etc. (see LICENCE).

Architecture

The system consists of the following components:

####cointrol-trader

• Polls various Bitstamp API endpoints
• Writes changes to DB
• Publishes changes to Redis pub/sub
• Opens orders, when suitable

###cointrol-server

• Serves Webapp static files
• Exposes DB for Webapp via a REST API
• Forwards Redis pub/sub messages from Trader to Webapp via WebSocket
• Exposes Django administration that is currently used for managing trading sessions

webapp

• REST/WebSocket API-powered Single Page App
• Real-time updated overview on orders, transactions, and trading sessions

Technology

The server-side parts (cointrol-server + cointrol-trader) are written in Python 3 (3.3+ is required) and use a mixture of Django (models, admin) and Tornado (WebSockets, async IO). Other libraries that are used include sockjs-tornado, Django REST framework.

The single-page webapp is written in CoffeeScript, Sass, Handlebars and uses Backbone.js, Brunch, socksjs-client, Bootstrap.

Installation

Prerequisites

• Python 3.3+
• Redis
• npm

Install Cointrol

Ubuntu prerequisites:

sudo apt-get install git python-pip python3-dev npm redis-server

Server

mkdir Cointrol && cd Cointrol

# Create an isolated virtual environment
pip install virtualenv
virtualenv ./virtualenv --python=$(which python3)

# Activate the virtualenv
# IMPORTANT: it needs to be activated every time before you run
#            a manage.py or cointrol-* command.
. virtualenv/bin/activate

git clone [email protected]:jkbrzt/cointrol.git

echo 'from .settings_dev import *' > cointrol/cointrol/conf/settings_local.py

pip install -r cointrol/cointrol/conf/requirements.txt
pip install -e ./cointrol

cointrol/manage.py syncdb --noinput

Web client

Install dependencies and build the app.

# Install dependencies
sudo npm -g install bower
cd cointrol/webapp
npm install
bower install

# Build the app
brunch build

# Use `brunch watch` during development

Create user

. virtualenv/bin/activate
cointrol/manage.py createsuperuser

Configure Bitstamp API access

1. Go to https://www.bitstamp.net/account/security/api to get you API key/secret
2. Activate the virtualenv and run cointrol-server
3. Go to http://localhost:8000/admin/core/account/1/ and enter your Bitstamp account details

Usage

Start the sever

. virtualenv/bin/activate
cointrol-server

By default, it will run on http://localhost:8000. You can change the port with --port=<port>.

The Django administration interface is used for log-in — just go back to / after you've done that.

Start the updater/trader

. virtualenv/bin/activate
cointrol-trader

Trading

1. Through the admin (http://localhost:8000/admin/) you can create a trading strategy profile. It can be for the fixed (fixed price points in USD are used as buy/sell triggers) or the relative (percentage of the initial BTC price are used) strategy.
2. Create a trading session (also in the admin interface).
3. To perform actual transactions, you'll have to enable them in the settings (we used the settings_dev module which disables them). Add COINTROL_DO_TRADE = True to your cointrol/cointrol/conf/settings_local.py.

Settings

The settings is resolved in this order:

1. settings_local.py
2. settings_(prod|dev).py
3. settings_defaults.py
4. Django defaults

During the installation process, you've created cointrol/cointrol/conf/settings_local.py which imports settings from the settings_dev.py file. All the settings are Django settings. The only non-Django settings is COINTROL_DO_TRADE (False in dev, True in prod). You can override any of the default settings in the settings_local.py file.

Besides settings_dev.py, the conf directory also has settings_prod.py, which is more suitable for production use. It defines logging configuration which makes messages of a level >= WARNING logged by the trader to be sent to you via email (e.g. when the trader places an order or there is an error). If you decide to use this settings file (by changing the import in settings_local.py to from .settings_prod import *, you'll have to configure at least DATABASES, ADMINS and SECRET_KEY as well in your in settings_local.py.

Contact

Jakub Roztocil

• https://github.com/jkbrzt
• https://twitter.com/jkbrzt
• 3NVcdcoXrBV7jKv7T3st6kQz7XdsPNUn34

Licence

MIT. See LICENCE.