guillaumeduliscouet/currentcy

Keep a dropbox file updated with monthly currency exchange values

currentcy

The objective is to have a CSV file in your dropbox containing monthly exchange rate data.
The resulting CSV follows this format:

201804,EUR,1.00000
201804,FJD,2.50378
201804,FKP,0.877244
201804,GBP,0.877244
201804,GEL,2.99265
201804,GGP,0.877244
201804,GHS,5.43969
201804,GIP,0.877244
201804,GMD,58.3465
201804,GNF,11099.6
201804,GTQ,9.12441

It should be easy to add a new month of data to the file so that in the end a little script could be automatically run every month to update the CSV for you.

Structure of the solution

It is a node.js script that has an access to your dropbox (to update the csv) and to an api (to get currency data).

Serveur mode (npm run serv)

It is a very simple node.js (without express.js) back-end server that will add exchange rates to the CSV on a GET request, for a specific month to be indicated in the URL.

Script mode (npm run script)

By running the script mode you can directly add exchange rates to the CSV for the last month, a specific month or a range of month

Getting started

Prerequisites

Linux environment

You need to have npm and node.js installed.

Currency API

You need to create an account on https://openexchangerates.org/ to get an API key. It is free and you get the right to 1,000 request per month, which is largly sufficient for our use case.

Dropbox

You need a dropbox account, of course, and you need to create an app in https://www.dropbox.com/developers/apps.
Choose "Dropbox API".
Then for the type of access I took "full dropbox" because I wanted my CSV to be in a specific shared folder. You can choose "App Folder" if your ok with your CSV being in "Apps/your_app_name/".
Finally you need to go in your new app settings to generate an access token.

.env

You need to create a ".env" file at the root of your local copy with your own environment parameters. You can reuse the content in "example.env".

• BASE_RATE is the 3 letters code of the currency to be used as the base of the exchange rates.
• RATE_API_KEY is the openexchangerates API key you retreived in the previous step.
• DBX_TOKEN is the Dropbox token you retreived in the previous step.
• FILE_PATH is the path from the root of your Dropbox (if you choose "Full Dropbox" access type) to the CSV file you want to create and maintain. Format to respect :"/path/to/file.csv" (e.g. "/currency.csv").
• DEV_PATH is the path that will be used instead of FILE_PATH when running in development mode (npm run test).

install dependencies

In your local copy:

npm install

Run the server

This is for running and calling the server on localhost:3000 (assuming you kept the defaults in .env)

Launch the server

npm run dev

Make a call for march 2016

Click on http://localhost:3000/add/2016-03

Get historical monthly data from 01/2015 to 12/2017

Install curl if you don't have it. And make sequencial URL call according to https://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html

apt-get install curl
curl http://localhost:3000/add/[2015-2017]-[01-12]

Run the script

Add last month

npm run script

Add a specific month

npm run script 2016-03

Add multiple months

npm run script 2010-05 2018-04 This will add all the months in the defined range (inclusive of start and end dates).