Gecko Fetcher

Service for periodical fetching data from the CoinGecko.com and saving it in json file.

CoinGecko is a website and mobile app used to aggregate information regarding the performance of the majority of all cryptocurrencies available.

By default, service is making request to Coingecko api endpoint '/coins/markets to fetch data of the first 1200 coins/tokens and save them to file ~/data/coingecko_data.json. It was meant to work in the background and ensure local file with up-to-date (but not real-time) coin prices for other apps.

Requirements

Requires python3 and requests library.

pip install requests

Installation

install script

Clone the repository. It is suggested to keep main script gecko_fetcher.py in ~/bin/. You need to provide proper path to this script in the file that define systemd service (see install service section below).

edit path in the script

Provide proper path to the file where data will be saved. You need to edit gecko_fetcher.py file. In my case it is:

DATA_FILE = "/home/safjan/data/coingecko_data.json"

install service on Linux with systemd

Edit gecko_fether.service and provide proper path to the script and the python executable.

Copy gecko_fether.service to /etc/systemd/system/gecko_fetcher.service

The ExecStart flag takes in the command that you want to run. So basically the first argument is the python path (in my case it’s python3) and the second argument is the path to the script that needs to be executed. Restart flag is set to always because I want to restart my service if the server gets restarted. Now we need to reload the daemon.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Let’s enable our service so that it doesn’t get disabled if the server restarts.

sudo systemctl enable gecko_fetcher.service

And now let’ start our service.

sudo systemctl start gecko_fetcher.service

Now our service is up and running.

control service

There are several commands you can do to start, stop, restart, and check status. To stop the service.

sudo systemctl stop gecko_fetcher.service

To restart.

sudo systemctl restart gecko_fetcher.service

To check status.

sudo systemctl status gecko_fetcher.service

service start order

In case of problems with failing to start the service, one can delay start with:

[Service]
ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 30

or put it later in the order in services, e.g. make it dependent on getty_target.service or Type=idle.

install service on macos

TBD

Credits

Thanks to WasiUllah Khan for the article Setup a python script as a service through systemctl/systemd which was great instruction how to create service. Parts of the article were adopted and included to this README.