The official Python library for the Coinbase API.

• Near-100% test coverage.
• Support for both API Key + Secret and OAuth 2 authentication.
• Convenient methods for making calls to the API - packs JSON for you!
• Automatic parsing of API responses into relevant Python objects.
• All objects have tab-completable methods and attributes when using IPython.

coinbase is available on PYPI. Install with pip:

pip install coinbase

or with easy_install:

easy_install coinbase

The library is currently tested against Python versions 2.6.9, 2.7.9, 3.2, 3.3.6, and 3.4.2.

Note: the PyPI coinbase package name used to refer to the unofficial coinbase_python library maintained by George Sibble . George graciously allowed us to use the name for this package instead. You can still find that package on Github . Thanks, George.

The first thing you'll need to do is sign up for coinbase.

If you're writing code for your own Coinbase account, enable an API key. Next, create a Client object for interacting with the API:

from coinbase.client import Client
client = Client(api_key, api_secret)

If you're writing code that will act on behalf of another user, start by creating a new OAuth 2 application. You will need to do some work to obtain OAuth credentials for your users; while outside the scope of this document, please refer to our OAuth 2 tutorial and documentation. Once you have these credentials, create a client:

from coinbase.client import OAuthClient
client = OAuthClient(client_id, client_secret, access_token, refresh_token)

With a Client, you can now make API calls. We've included some examples below, but in general the library has Python classes for each of the objects described in our REST API documentation. These classes each have methods for making the relevant API calls; for instance, coinbase.model.Transaction.complete maps to the "complete bitcoin request" API endpoint. The docstring of each method in the code references the endpoint it implements. Each API method returns a dict subclass representing the JSON response from the API, with some niceties like pretty-printing and attr-style item access (response.data is equiivalent to response['data']).

Listing available accounts

accounts = client.get_accounts()

Buying bitcoin

wallet = client.get_account('54a710dd25dc9a311800003f')

# Buy 1 BTC using the default payment method
wallet.buy('1.0')

# Buy 1 BTC using a specific payment method
credit_card = client.get_payment_method('54a710de25dc9a311800006e')
wallet.buy('1.0', payment_method_id=credit_card.id)

Selling bitcoin

wallet = client.get_account('54a710dd25dc9a311800003f')

# Sell 1 BTC using the default payment method
wallet.sell('1.0')

# Sell 1 BTC using a specific payment method
bank = client.get_payment_method('9aaa10de25dca28e2118001999')
wallet.sell('1.0', payment_method_id=bank.id)

Sending bitcoin

wallet = client.get_account('54a710dd25dc9a311800003f')
vault = wallet.get_account('54a710dd25dc9a3118000040')
# Send 1 BTC from your wallet to vault
tx = wallet.send_money(vault.id, '1')

# Send 10 USD to someone by email address
tx = wallet.send_money(
    'satoshi@example.com',
    amount_string='10.00',
    amount_currency_iso='USD')

Requesting bitcoin

wallet = client.get_account('54a710dd25dc9a311800003f')
# Request 10 BTC from a client
tx = wallet.request_money(
    'client@example.com',
    '10',
    notes='Contractor hours in January (website redesign for 10 BTC)')

# Request $500 USD from a roommate
tx = wallet.request_money(
    'roommate@example.com',
    amount_string='500.00',
    amount_currency_iso='USD',
    notes='Return for January 2015')

Listing current transactions

account = client.get_account()
transactions = account.get_transactions()

Checking bitcoin prices

buy_data = client.get_buy_price()
sell_data = client.get_sell_price()
spot_data = client.get_spot_price()

All errors occuring during interaction with the API will be raise as exceptions. These exceptions will be subclasses of coinbase.error.CoinbaseError. When the error involves an API request and/or response, the error will be a subclass of coinbase.error.APIError, and include request and response attributes with more information about the failed interaction.

When using the coinbase.client.OAuthClient, the access token being used to authenticate you may expire. Should this happen, a coinbase.error.ExpiredAccessToken exception will be raised. The coinbase.client.OAuthClient provides a convenient helper method for refreshing the access token:

new_token_data = oauth_client.refresh()

This method will update the values stored in the client and return a dict containing information from the token endpoint so that you can update your records.

{
  'access_token': '405237b48b0d8bddd24856c208103aa53df5bf3d8118ed459396bd1974a33dbf',
  'expires_in': 7200,
  'refresh_token': 'b96ad9e737d6109e62f29a69342a8e837863098774f83b759bbf46fb4bc493ed',
  'scope': 'merchant balance addresses buttons buy contacts orders sell transactions request transfer transfers user send',
  'token_type': 'bearer',
}

Any and all contributions are welcome! The process is simple: fork this repo, make your changes, run the test suite, and submit a pull request. Tests are run via nosetest. To run the tests, clone the repository and then:

# Install the requirements
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -r test-requirements.txt

# Run the tests for your current version of Python
make tests

If you'd also like to generate an HTML coverage report (useful for figuring out which lines of code are actually being tested), make sure the requirements are installed and then run:

make coverage

We use tox to run the test suite against multiple versions of Python. You can install tox with pip or easy_install:

pip install tox
easy_install tox

Tox requires the appropriate Python interpreters to run the tests in different environments. We recommend using pyenv for this. Once you've installed the appropriate interpreters, running the tests in each environment is simple:

tox