Configuring `wetrade` settings

Check out the information below for details on configuring your wetrade settings. As detailed below, wetrade relies on a settings.py file in the root directory of your project.

Settings introduction

If you created your application using the new-project script detailed in Getting Started, you’ll see a settings.py file in your app directory. This file contains your account information and other important global wetrade settings. Yours may look something like this:

settings.py

# E-Trade settings
login_method = 'auto' # 'auto', 'manual'
use_2fa = False # needed to disable SMS auth - requires totp_secret
config_id = 'sandbox'
config_options = {
'sandbox':{
  'base_url': 'https://apisb.etrade.com/',
  'client_key': 'SANDBOX_CLIENT_KEY',
  'client_secret': 'SANDBOX_CLIENT_SECRET',
  'username': 'USERNAME',
  'password': 'PASSWORD',
  'totp_secret': 'TOTP_SECRET'},
'prod':{
  'base_url': 'https://api.etrade.com/',
  'client_key': 'PROD_CLIENT_KEY',
  'client_secret': 'PROD_CLIENT_SECRET',
  'username': 'USERNAME',
  'password': 'PASSWORD',
  'totp_secret': 'TOTP_SECRET'}}
# Google Cloud settings (optional)
# need GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS env var set to json path
enable_logging = False
quote_bucket = 'your-quote-bucket'

config = config_options[config_id]

Please note: the config = config_options[config_id] line is required to set your configuration.

But I don’t want to store my password in plain text

Fret not my friend, we’ve got you covered! We’ve thought of a few easy options to avoid storing passwords in plain text, and because settings.py is a python file, you could potentially come up with many additional ways of accessing your password.

Using Google Cloud Secret Manager

We’ve integrated Google Cloud Secret Manager to provide a secure way to access passwords stored on this free service that’s linked to your Google Account.

After following the instructions for setting up your Google Cloud account, you can access Google Cloud secrets (eg: ‘my-secret-id’) in your settings.py file:

from wetrade.utils import get_gcloud_secret


# E-Trade settings
login_method = 'auto' # 'auto', 'manual'
use_2fa = False # needed to disable SMS auth - requires totp_secret
config_id = 'sandbox'
config_options = {
'sandbox':{
  'base_url': 'https://apisb.etrade.com/',
  'client_key': 'SANDBOX_CLIENT_KEY',
  'client_secret': 'SANDBOX_CLIENT_SECRET',
  'username': 'USERNAME',
  'password': get_gcloud_secret('your-secret-id'),
  'totp_secret': 'TOTP_SECRET'},
'prod':{
  'base_url': 'https://api.etrade.com/',
  'client_key': 'PROD_CLIENT_KEY',
  'client_secret': 'PROD_CLIENT_SECRET',
  'username': 'USERNAME',
  'password': get_gcloud_secret('your-secret-id'),
  'totp_secret': 'TOTP_SECRET'}}
# Google Cloud settings (optional)
# need GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS env var set to json path
enable_logging = False
quote_bucket = 'your-quote-bucket'

config = config_options[config_id]

Using environment variables

For certain situations including cloud deployment, it may make sense to set your passwords in environment variables. Please note: we DO NOT recommend saving passwords in your shell config (eg: .bashrc, .profile, .zshrc) or in your venv/bin/activate file as this is no more secure than storing your passwords directly in settings.py . If you have to use environment variables locally, we’d recommended hiding your password env var from your shell history with a pattern and then setting environment variables in your individual terminal session as demonstrated below:

Hiding a pattern from your shell history

# bash / linux
export HISTIGNORE="*WETRADE_VAR*"
# zsh / mac
export HISTORY_IGNORE="*WETRADE_VAR*"

Setting an environment variable

export WETRADE_VAR=my-password

You can then access this environment variable in your settings.py file:

import os


# E-Trade settings
login_method = 'auto' # 'auto', 'manual'
use_2fa = False # needed to disable SMS auth - requires totp_secret
config_id = 'sandbox'
config_options = {
'sandbox':{
  'base_url': 'https://apisb.etrade.com/',
  'client_key': 'SANDBOX_CLIENT_KEY',
  'client_secret': 'SANDBOX_CLIENT_SECRET',
  'username': 'USERNAME',
  'password': os.environ['WETRADE_VAR'],
  'totp_secret': 'TOTP_SECRET'},
'prod':{
  'base_url': 'https://api.etrade.com/',
  'client_key': 'PROD_CLIENT_KEY',
  'client_secret': 'PROD_CLIENT_SECRET',
  'username': 'USERNAME',
  'password': os.environ['WETRADE_VAR'],
  'totp_secret': 'TOTP_SECRET'}}
# Google Cloud settings (optional)
# need GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS env var set to json path
enable_logging = False
quote_bucket = 'your-quote-bucket'

config = config_options[config_id]

Definitions

Required settings

login_method: str = 'auto'

Here you can set whether you want to login automatically (val=’auto’) with headless firefox, or manually (val=’manual’) using a url that is supplied in your terminal which requires input from the user.

use_2fa: bool = False

If you choose to login automatically, you have the option to authenticate with an authenticator app. E-Trade forces users to use the much maligned Symantec VIP Access application which people smarter than I have argued degrades the security of the TOTP protocol. Luckily, we can get around this restriction and bring our authenticator application by using python-vipaccess to generate a VIP Access ID as well as a secret we can include in our settings.py and load into our authenticator app of choice.

config_id: str = 'sandbox'

Here you can select between different config options listed in config_options this is helpful for testing in the API sandbox or listing multiple accounts in the same settings.py file.

config_options: dict

config_options is a dict containing the different options for configuring your application. The new-project template contains the pre-set keys ‘sandbox’ and ‘prod’ for your default configurations. If you’re using one account, you’d generally want to set the came value for username, password, and totp_secret.

Optional settings

enable_logging: bool = False

You can use this flag to enable logging using python’s logging module if you’ve set up Google Cloud integration and run setup_cloud_logging(), this allows you to store and access logs in Google’s convenient web UI which makes it easy to keep track of your trading activity especially when using multiple accounts.

quote_bucket: str = 'your-quote-bucket'

If you’re interested in storing data from a DataFrameQuote in the cloud, you can specify the name of a Google Cloud Storage bucket here to collect quote data stored as a pkl of a pandas DataFrame. This is useful when reviewing DataFrameQuote driven trading activity

headless_login: bool = True

If you’re having a difficult time logging in using login_method=’auto’, you can add headless_login=False in your settings.py to view the browser during login and troubleshoot your issue.

Configuring wetrade settings