Installing Alpaca’s Client SDK

In this guide, we’ll be making use of the SDKs provided by Alpaca. Alpaca maintains SDKs in four languages: Python, JavaScript, C#, and Go. Follow the steps in the installation guide below to install the SDK of your choice before proceeding to the next section.

pip install alpaca-py

npm install --save @alpacahq/alpaca-trade-api

dotnet add package Alpaca.Markets

go get -u github.com/alpacahq/alpaca-trade-api-go/v2/alpaca

Generate API Keys

How to Request Market Data Through the SDK

With the SDK installed and our API keys ready, you can start requesting market data. Alpaca offers many options for both historical and real-time data, so to keep this guide succint, these examples are on obtaining historical and real-time bar data. Information on what other data is available can be found in the Market Data API reference.

To start using the SDK for historical data, import the SDK and instantiate the crypto historical data client. It’s not required for this client to pass in API keys or a paper URL.

from alpaca.data.historical import CryptoHistoricalDataClient

# No keys required for crypto data
client = CryptoHistoricalDataClient()

const Alpaca = require("@alpacahq/alpaca-trade-api");

dotnet new console -o MyApp -f net6.0

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"

    "github.com/alpacahq/alpaca-trade-api-go/v2/marketdata"
)

func main() {

}

Next we’ll define the parameters for our request. Import the request class for crypto bars, CryptoBarsRequest and TimeFrame class to access time frame units more easily. This example queries for historical daily bar data of Bitcoin in the first week of September 2022.

from alpaca.data.requests import CryptoBarsRequest
from alpaca.data.timeframe import TimeFrame

# Creating request object
request_params = CryptoBarsRequest(
                        symbol_or_symbols=["BTC/USD"],
                        timeframe=TimeFrame.Day,
                        start="2022-09-01",
                        end="2022-09-07"
                        )

Finally, send the request using the client’s built-in method, get_crypto_bars. Additionally, we’ll access the .df property which returns a pandas DataFrame of the response.

# Retrieve daily bars for Bitcoin in a DataFrame and printing it
btc_bars = client.get_crypto_bars(request_params)

# Convert to dataframe
btc_bars.df

const Alpaca = require("@alpacahq/alpaca-trade-api");

dotnet new console -o MyApp -f net6.0

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"

    "github.com/alpacahq/alpaca-trade-api-go/v2/marketdata"
)

func main() {

}

Returns

        open    high    low close   volume  trade_count vwap
symbol  timestamp                           
BTC/USD 
        2022-09-01 05:00:00+00:00   20049.0 20285.0 19555.0 20160.0 2396.3504   18060.0 19920.278135
        2022-09-02 05:00:00+00:00   20159.0 20438.0 19746.0 19924.0 1688.0641   16730.0 20045.987764
        2022-09-03 05:00:00+00:00   19924.0 19963.0 19661.0 19802.0 624.1013    9853.0  19794.111057
        2022-09-04 05:00:00+00:00   19801.0 20060.0 19599.0 19892.0 1361.6668   8489.0  19885.445568
        2022-09-05 05:00:00+00:00   19892.0 20173.0 19640.0 19762.0 2105.0539   11900.0 19814.853546
        2022-09-06 05:00:00+00:00   19763.0 20025.0 18539.0 18720.0 3291.1657   19591.0 19272.505607
        2022-09-07 05:00:00+00:00   18723.0 19459.0 18678.0 19351.0 2259.2351   16204.0 19123.487500