Quick Start
Run the REST API with:
docker run -p 5000:5000 dradrian/ibportal
Navigate to localhost:5000 and login with your live or paper account.
The Application
Interactive Brokers offers an API to interact with their regular trading client. To use it, you need to have the trading client installed and running before you can connect your app and start streaming data. To get around this need for the trading client, Interactive Brokers created a REST API for their trading platform called Client Portal API.
This is essentially a web server that you install on your local system and send REST requests to. You can download the client from here, you can find the Client Portal API documentation here which includes a quick start guide with download instructions and documentation for each endpoint.
The Problem
The problem is that you need to install and run a Java runtime environment on your local machine.
If you’re anything like me, the idea of installing and running an environment so that you can install and run a web server so that you can make REST requests seems convoluted. It also means there are two new systems to manage, the Java runtime environment and the web server.
The Solution
I have made a Docker container for the Client Portal API. The container makes running the web server as easy as executing one command. And you can use docker-compose to orchestrate your application and its dependencies.
The container is light weight. As of this writing, the image is less than 70 MB.
Creating the image is a matter of downloading the portal, unzipping and running. The Dockerfile for this is:
FROM openjdk:8u212-jre-alpine3.9
WORKDIR /app
RUN apk add wget && \
wget https://download2.interactivebrokers.com/portal/clientportal.gw.zip && \
unzip clientportal.gw.zip -d . && \
rm clientportal.gw.zip && \
apk del wget
COPY conf.yaml root/conf.yaml
EXPOSE 5000
CMD sh bin/run.sh root/conf.yaml
The configuration file conf.yaml is poorly documented and required hacking around to get it working. If you’re curious as to how configuration works, you can checkout the full source over on Github: https://github.com/robolyst/ibportal.
Usage
Run the rest API with:
docker run -p 5000:5000 dradrian/ibportal
and navigate to localhost:5000. You’ll get a Interactive Brokers login screen. You can login with both your live and demo account.
I use docker-compose to orchestrate my trading apps. I include this in my docker-compose.yaml:
ibportal:
image: dradrian/ibportal:latest
ports:
- "5000:5000"
and once I have logged in, I can run some Python code like this:
import requests
contract_id = 265598
url = f"https://ibportal:5000/v1/api/iserver/contract/{contract_id}/info"
# We need to disable SSL verification to use the API
session = requests.Session()
session.verify = False
session.get(url).json()
and I’ll get back a JSON blob containing:
{
"symbol": "AAPL",
"con_id": 265598,
"industry": "Computers",
"instrument_type": "STK",
"local_symbol": "AAPL",
"currency": "USD",
"company_name": "APPLE INC",
}
Show Support
If you like this, please show your support by staring the Github repository at https://github.com/robolyst/ibportal. Thank you. ❤️