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Installation

This page explains how to prepare your environment for running the bot.

The freqtrade documentation describes various ways to install freqtrade

Please consider using the prebuilt docker images to get started quickly while evaluating how freqtrade works.

Information

For Windows installation, please use the windows installation guide.

The easiest way to install and run Freqtrade is to clone the bot Github repository and then run the ./setup.sh script, if it's available for your platform.

Version considerations

When cloning the repository the default working branch has the name develop. This branch contains all last features (can be considered as relatively stable, thanks to automated tests). The stable branch contains the code of the last release (done usually once per month on an approximately one week old snapshot of the develop branch to prevent packaging bugs, so potentially it's more stable).

Note

Python3.8 or higher and the corresponding pip are assumed to be available. The install-script will warn you and stop if that's not the case. git is also needed to clone the Freqtrade repository.
Also, python headers (python<yourversion>-dev / python<yourversion>-devel) must be available for the installation to complete successfully.

Up-to-date clock

The clock on the system running the bot must be accurate, synchronized to a NTP server frequently enough to avoid problems with communication to the exchanges.

Running setup.py install for gym did not run successfully.

If you get an error related with gym we suggest you to downgrade setuptools it to version 65.5.0 you can do it with the following command: 

pip install setuptools==65.5.0

Requirements

These requirements apply to both Script Installation and Manual Installation.

ARM64 systems

If you are running an ARM64 system (like a MacOS M1 or an Oracle VM), please use docker to run freqtrade. While native installation is possible with some manual effort, this is not supported at the moment.

Install guide

Install code

We've included/collected install instructions for Ubuntu, MacOS, and Windows. These are guidelines and your success may vary with other distros. OS Specific steps are listed first, the Common section below is necessary for all systems.

Note

Python3.8 or higher and the corresponding pip are assumed to be available.

Install necessary dependencies

# update repository
sudo apt-get update

# install packages
sudo apt install -y python3-pip python3-venv python3-dev python3-pandas git curl

The following assumes the latest Raspbian Buster lite image. This image comes with python3.9 preinstalled, making it easy to get freqtrade up and running.

Tested using a Raspberry Pi 3 with the Raspbian Buster lite image, all updates applied.

sudo apt-get install python3-venv libatlas-base-dev cmake curl
# Use pywheels.org to speed up installation
sudo echo "[global]\nextra-index-url=https://www.piwheels.org/simple" > tee /etc/pip.conf

git clone https://github.com/freqtrade/freqtrade.git
cd freqtrade

bash setup.sh -i

Installation duration

Depending on your internet speed and the Raspberry Pi version, installation can take multiple hours to complete. Due to this, we recommend to use the pre-build docker-image for Raspberry, by following the Docker quickstart documentation

Note

The above does not install hyperopt dependencies. To install these, please use python3 -m pip install -e .[hyperopt]. We do not advise to run hyperopt on a Raspberry Pi, since this is a very resource-heavy operation, which should be done on powerful machine.

Freqtrade repository

Freqtrade is an open source crypto-currency trading bot, whose code is hosted on github.com

# Download `develop` branch of freqtrade repository
git clone https://github.com/freqtrade/freqtrade.git

# Enter downloaded directory
cd freqtrade

# your choice (1): novice user
git checkout stable

# your choice (2): advanced user
git checkout develop

(1) This command switches the cloned repository to the use of the stable branch. It's not needed, if you wish to stay on the (2) develop branch.

You may later switch between branches at any time with the git checkout stable/git checkout develop commands.

Install from pypi

An alternative way to install Freqtrade is from pypi. The downside is that this method requires ta-lib to be correctly installed beforehand, and is therefore currently not the recommended way to install Freqtrade.

pip install freqtrade

Script Installation

First of the ways to install Freqtrade, is to use provided the Linux/MacOS ./setup.sh script, which install all dependencies and help you configure the bot.

Make sure you fulfill the Requirements and have downloaded the Freqtrade repository.

Use /setup.sh -install (Linux/MacOS)

If you are on Debian, Ubuntu or MacOS, freqtrade provides the script to install freqtrade.

# --install, Install freqtrade from scratch
./setup.sh -i

Activate your virtual environment

Each time you open a new terminal, you must run source .env/bin/activate to activate your virtual environment.

# then activate your .env
source ./.env/bin/activate

Congratulations

You are ready, and run the bot

Other options of /setup.sh script

You can as well update, configure and reset the codebase of your bot with ./script.sh

# --update, Command git pull to update.
./setup.sh -u
# --reset, Hard reset your develop/stable branch.
./setup.sh -r

** --install **

With this option, the script will install the bot and most dependencies:
You will need to have git and python3.8+ installed beforehand for this to work.

* Mandatory software as: `ta-lib`
* Setup your virtualenv under `.env/`

This option is a combination of installation tasks and `--reset`

** --update **

This option will pull the last version of your current branch and update your virtualenv. Run the script with this option periodically to update your bot.

** --reset **

This option will hard reset your branch (only if you are on either `stable` or `develop`) and recreate your virtualenv.

Manual Installation

Make sure you fulfill the Requirements and have downloaded the Freqtrade repository.

Install TA-Lib

TA-Lib script installation

sudo ./build_helpers/install_ta-lib.sh

Note

This will use the ta-lib tar.gz included in this repository.

TA-Lib manual installation

Official installation guide

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ta-lib/ta-lib-0.4.0-src.tar.gz
tar xvzf ta-lib-0.4.0-src.tar.gz
cd ta-lib
sed -i.bak "s|0.00000001|0.000000000000000001 |g" src/ta_func/ta_utility.h
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
# On debian based systems (debian, ubuntu, ...) - updating ldconfig might be necessary.
sudo ldconfig  
cd ..
rm -rf ./ta-lib*

Setup Python virtual environment (virtualenv)

You will run freqtrade in separated virtual environment

# create virtualenv in directory /freqtrade/.env
python3 -m venv .env

# run virtualenv
source .env/bin/activate

Install python dependencies

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install -e .

Congratulations

You are ready, and run the bot

(Optional) Post-installation Tasks

Note

If you run the bot on a server, you should consider using Docker or a terminal multiplexer like screen or tmux to avoid that the bot is stopped on logout.

On Linux with software suite systemd, as an optional post-installation task, you may wish to setup the bot to run as a systemd service or configure it to send the log messages to the syslog/rsyslog or journald daemons. See Advanced Logging for details.

Installation with Conda

Freqtrade can also be installed with Miniconda or Anaconda. We recommend using Miniconda as it's installation footprint is smaller. Conda will automatically prepare and manage the extensive library-dependencies of the Freqtrade program.

What is Conda?

Conda is a package, dependency and environment manager for multiple programming languages: conda docs

Installation with conda

Install Conda

Installing on linux

Installing on windows

Answer all questions. After installation, it is mandatory to turn your terminal OFF and ON again.

Freqtrade download

Download and install freqtrade.

# download freqtrade
git clone https://github.com/freqtrade/freqtrade.git

# enter downloaded directory 'freqtrade'
cd freqtrade

Freqtrade install: Conda Environment

conda create --name freqtrade python=3.10

Creating Conda Environment

The conda command create -n automatically installs all nested dependencies for the selected libraries, general structure of installation command is:

# choose your own packages
conda env create -n [name of the environment] [python version] [packages]

Enter/exit freqtrade environment

To check available environments, type

conda env list

Enter installed environment

# enter conda environment
conda activate freqtrade

# exit conda environment - don't do it now
conda deactivate

Install last python dependencies with pip

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
python3 -m pip install -e .

Patch conda libta-lib (Linux only)

# Ensure that the environment is active!
conda activate freqtrade

cd build_helpers
bash install_ta-lib.sh ${CONDA_PREFIX} nosudo

Congratulations

You are ready, and run the bot

Important shortcuts

# list installed conda environments
conda env list

# activate base environment
conda activate

# activate freqtrade environment
conda activate freqtrade

#deactivate any conda environments
conda deactivate

Further info on anaconda

New heavy packages

It may happen that creating a new Conda environment, populated with selected packages at the moment of creation takes less time than installing a large, heavy library or application, into previously set environment.

pip install within conda

The documentation of conda says that pip should NOT be used within conda, because internal problems can occur. However, they are rare. Anaconda Blogpost

Nevertheless, that is why, the conda-forge channel is preferred:

  • more libraries are available (less need for pip)
  • conda-forge works better with pip
  • the libraries are newer

Happy trading!

You are ready

You've made it this far, so you have successfully installed freqtrade.

Initialize the configuration

# Step 1 - Initialize user folder
freqtrade create-userdir --userdir user_data

# Step 2 - Create a new configuration file
freqtrade new-config --config config.json

You are ready to run, read Bot Configuration, remember to start with dry_run: True and verify that everything is working.

To learn how to setup your configuration, please refer to the Bot Configuration documentation page.

Start the Bot

freqtrade trade --config config.json --strategy SampleStrategy

Warning

You should read through the rest of the documentation, backtest the strategy you're going to use, and use dry-run before enabling trading with real money.

Troubleshooting

Common problem: "command not found"

If you used (1)Script or (2)Manual installation, you need to run the bot in virtual environment. If you get error as below, make sure venv is active.

# if:
bash: freqtrade: command not found

# then activate your .env
source ./.env/bin/activate

MacOS installation error

Newer versions of MacOS may have installation failed with errors like error: command 'g++' failed with exit status 1.

This error will require explicit installation of the SDK Headers, which are not installed by default in this version of MacOS. For MacOS 10.14, this can be accomplished with the below command.

open /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/Packages/macOS_SDK_headers_for_macOS_10.14.pkg

If this file is inexistent, then you're probably on a different version of MacOS, so you may need to consult the internet for specific resolution details.

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