By default once you have a valid client_id and client_secret, any paper account and the live account associated with the OAuth Client will be available to connect to your app. We welcome developers to build applications and products that are powered by Alpaca while also protecting the privacy and security of our users. To build using Alpaca’s APIs, please follow the guide below.

Getting the Access Token

At a high level the flow looks like this, we will go into detail about each step

1. User requests a connection between your application and Alpaca
2. User is redirected to Alpaca to login and authorize the application from inside the dashbaord
3. Alpaca grants an authorization token to your application thorugh user-agent
4. You application then makes an access token request
5. Alpaca returns an access token grant.

1. Request for Connection on Behalf of User

When redirecting a user to Alpaca to authorize access to your application, you’ll need to construct the authorization URL with the correct parameters and scopes.

GET https://app.alpaca.markets/oauth/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&redirect_uri=YOUR_REDIRECT_URL&state=SOMETHING_RANDOM&scope=account:write%20trading

Here’s a list of parameters you should always specify:

Allowed Scopes

We will be adding more scopes soon.

2. Users Authorizing App to Access Alpaca Account

From the user side, they will see the following authorization screen

3. Alpaca Redirect Back to App

If the user approves access, Alpaca will redirect them back to your redirect_uri with a temporary code parameter. If you specified a state parameter in step 1, it will be returned as well. The parameter will always match the value specified in step 1. If the values don’t match, the request should not be trusted.

Example

GET https://example.com/oauth/callback?code=67f74f5a-a2cc-4ebd-88b4-22453fe07994&state=8e02c9c6a3484fadaaf841fb1df290e1

4. App Receives Authorization Code

You can then use this code to exchange for an access token.

5. App Exchanges Auth Code with Access Token

After you have received the temporary code, you can exchange it for an access token. This can be done by making a POST call to https://api.alpaca.markets/oauth/token

Parameters (All Required)

🚧

Note

This request should take place behind-the-scenes from your backend server and shouldn’t be visible to the end users for security purposes.

The content type must be application/x-www-form-urlencoded as defined in RFC.

Example request:

curl -X POST https://api.alpaca.markets/oauth/token \
  -d 'grant_type=authorization_code&code=67f74f5a-a2cc-4ebd-88b4-22453fe07994&client_id=fc9c55efa3924f369d6c1148e668bbe8&client_secret=5b8027074d8ab434882c0806833e76508861c366&redirect_uri=https://example.com/oauth/callback'

After a successful request, a valid access token will be returned in the response:

{
    "access_token": "79500537-5796-4230-9661-7f7108877c60",
    "token_type": "bearer",
    "scope": "account:write trading"
}

API Calls

Once you have integrated and have a valid access token you can start make calls to Alpaca Trading API v2 on behalf of the end-user.

Example Requests

A

curl https://api.alpaca.markets/v2/account /
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer 79500537-5796-4230-9661-7f7108877c60'

curl https://paper-api.alpaca.markets/v2/orders /
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer 79500537-5796-4230-9661-7f7108877c60'

The OAuth token can also be used for the trade update websockets stream.

{
  "action": "authenticate",
  "data": {
    "oauth_token": "79500537-5796-4230-9661-7f7108877c60"
  }
}