Bitshares Ruby Gem

This Gem provides a Ruby API for the BitShares command line client by exposing the RPC commands of the Bitshares client v0.x as methods of it's Client class.

The binary client; "bitshares_client" must be installed, configured and running. The Gem detects the port the HTTP JSON RPC server is running on and expects the RPC endpoint to be localhost for security reasons - see Configuration file settings.

Requirements

Important: The interface uses the command line binary, not the GUI app. Tested with v0.9.2 client on Mac OS X (10.9.5) and Ubuntu 14.04. Should work on any *NIX platform - sorry not Windows.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'bitshares'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install bitshares

Authentication

RPC server login credentials (registered account name and password) must be stored in the following environment variables or set in the configuation (see below):-

$BITSHARES_ACCOUNT

$BITSHARES_PASSWORD

Configuration

Config settings may be set via a hash or Yaml file.

Via a hash

RPC server login credentials may be set as follows:

Bitshares.configure(:rpc_username => 'whatever')
Bitshares.configure(:rpc_password => 'whatever')

The Gem allows multiple wallet names and passwords to be stored so that actions requiring these data may be automated. To use this functionality - i.e. with the Wallet class (see below) wallet names and passwords must be configured in either of the following ways:

Bitshares.configure(:wallet => {'wallet1' => 'password1'})
Bitshares.configure(:wallet => {'wallet2' => 'password2'})
...

From a Yaml configuration file

Bitshares.configure_with 'path-to-Yaml-file'

Bitshares.config # returns the configuration hash

Usage

Quick start

require 'bitshares'

client = CLIENT.init # CLIENT = Bitshares::Client -the object BitShares RPC client calls are routed to.
client.synced? # if you wish to check whether you are synced with the p2p network.

Any valid client command can then be issued via a method call with relevant parameters - e.g.

client.get_info
client.wallet_open 'default'
client.blockchain_list_delegates
client_wallet_market_submit_bid(account, amount, quote, price, base)
...

Data is returned as a hash

Detailed usage

Blockchain

The blockchain is implemented as a class purely for convenience when calling 'blockchain_' methods:

chain = Bitshares::Blockchain # CHAIN may be used
count = chain.get_block_count # equivalent to client.blockchain_get_block_count

Wallet

wallet = Bitshares::Wallet.new 'wallet1' # opens a wallet available on this client.

Note that the following command opens the named wallet, but does not return an instance of Wallet class - use Wallet.new

wallet.open 'wallet1'

Thereafter 'wallet_' commands may be issued like this:

wallet.get_info # gets info on this wallet, equivalent to client.wallet_get_info
wallet.transfer(amount, asset, from, recipient) # equivalent to - you get the picture..

A wallet is unlocked and closed in a similar fashion:

wallet.unlock
wallet.close

Predicates are provided for convenience:

wallet.open?
wallet.unlocked?

Account

Once you have a wallet instance you can do the following, which references a particular wallet account:

account = wallet.account 'account_name'

Thereafter all 'wallet_account_' client commands may be issued without specifying the account_name parameter:

account.balance # balance for a particular account
account.order_list # optional [limit] param
account_register(pay_from_account [, optional params]) # this command takes up to 3 optional params

'wallet_account_' client commands taking an optional account_name parameter list all data for all of a wallet's accounts. If this is required, the relevant Wallet method should be used - e.g:

wallet.account_balance # lists the balances for all accounts for this wallet (c.c. above)

Market

The market class represents the trading (order book and history) for a given an asset-pair - e.g. CNY/BTS. It is instantiated like this:

cny_bts = Bitshares::Market.new('CNY', 'BTS')

Note that the BitShares market convention is that quote asset_id > base asset_id. Reversing the symbols in the above example results in the client returning an 'Invalid Market' error. An asset's id can be found from the asset hash by using:

Bitshares::Blockchain.get_asset 'CNY' # for example

The following 'blockchain_market_' client methods may then be used without specifying the quote and base assets again, but with any other optional args the client accepts:

cny_bts.list_asks # equivalent to blockchain_market_list_asks(quote, base) [limit]
cny_bts.list_bids
cny_bts.list_covers
cny_bts.order_book
cny_bts.order_history
cny_bts.price_history # required params are: <start time> <duration> optional: [granularity]

cny_bts.list_shorts # requires no params and ignores the base asset
cny_bts.get_asset_collateral # requires no params and returns the collateral for the quote asset (ignores the base asset)

Additionally, the following methods are available:

cny_bts.lowest_ask
cny_bts.highest_bid
cny_bts.mid_price # mean of the above
cny_bts.last_fill # price of the last filled order

Trading

So, once we have an account and a market, what do we need to trade - why a Trader of course!

cny_bts_trader = Bitshares::Trader.new(account, cny_bts) # using examples above

You can now do this:

cny_bts_trader.order_list # lists orders for the account and market - optional limit arg. Returns orders array

cny_bts_trader.submit_bid(quantity, price) # buy <quantity> of Market base (BTS here) at <price> (quote/base)
cny_bts_trader.submit_ask(quantity, price) # sell <quantity> of Market base (BTS here) at <price> (quote/base)
  # both return respective order id

cny_bts_trader.cancel_orders(*order_ids) # cancels one or more orders for the account and market
  # returns array of memo's e.g. 'cancel ASK-90189b6e'

Specification & tests

For the full specification clone this repo and run:

rake spec

Test Requirements

There is currently no test blockchain, so the test suite runs on the live one - orders and all. If this concerns you - and it should 😱 - feel free to browse the test code first. This means that the environment variables described in Authentication above must be set to a valid wallet account and password in order for the test suite to access the p2p network. Additionally, the following client 'fixtures' are required for the full test suite to run and pass:

An empty wallet 'test1', with password 'password1' and an account called 'account-test' Please don't register this account!.

Tests with a real cost (e.g. submitting/cancelling orders) are disabled by default. To include these use the following environment variable setting:

export BITSHARES_INCLUDE_TESTS_WITH_COSTS=true

If these tests are included, the 'test1' account will need funding beforehand with a few BTS, as trades/cancellations are 0.5 BTS each. 10 BTS (circa 2.5 cents right now) should be more than enough to run the suite a few times.

Contributing

Bug reports, pull requests (and feature requests) are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/MatzFan/bitshares-ruby.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.