Quickstart

This quickstart guide assumes you have already installed the client. If you haven’t, read Installation first.

Setting up logging

When developing, it’s often useful to turn on debug logging console output:

import logging
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)

Starting a session

In order to do anything meaningful with the API, you must first start a new session. We import the base module and create our SessionSettings object:

>>> from smarkets.streaming_api.api import (
...     BUY, SELL, OrderCreate, Session, SessionSettings, StreamingAPIClient)
>>> username = 'username'
>>> password = 'password'
>>> settings = SessionSettings(username, password)
>>> settings.host = 'api.smarkets.com'
>>> settings.port = 3701

Then, we create the Session object which we will use to keep track of sequence numbers:

>>> session = Session(settings)

Finally, the Client class is the higher-level wrapper which allows us to send and handle messages:

>>> client = StreamingAPIClient(session)

Now, let’s login!

>>> client.login()

We can also test our connectivity:

>>> client.ping()
>>> client.flush()
>>> client.read()  # this will read a 'pong' response

And logout:

>>> client.logout()

Placing a bet

The Order class provides the mechanism to send a message to create a new order:

>>> order = OrderCreate()
>>> order.quantity = 400000  # 40.0000 GBP payout
>>> order.price = 2500  # 25.00%
>>> order.side = BUY
>>> order.market_id = some_market
>>> order.contract_id = some_contract

The above order is a buy (or back) at 25.00% (or 4.0 in decimal format) for a £40.00 return. The buyer’s liability if the execution is at 25.00% will be £10.00.

Now, we send the create message:

>>> client.order(order)
>>> client.flush()

Registering callback functions

We can register some relatively simple callback functions for various messages. This example uses the text_format module from the protocol buffers package to simply print the message to stdout:

>>> from google.protobuf import text_format
>>> def login_response_callback(message):
>>>     print "Received a eto.login_response: %s" % (
>>>         text_format.MessageToString(message))
>>> def global_callback(message_name, message):
>>>     print "[global] Received a %s: %s" % (
>>>         message_name, text_format.MessageToString(message.protobuf))

First, we register the callback for the eto.login_response message:

>>> client.add_handler('eto.login_response', login_response_callback)

We can also register a global handler which will be called for every message received:

>>> client.add_global_handler(global_callback)