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barrucadu / hledger-scripts

Helpful scripts to do things with your hledger data.
MIT License
53 stars 7 forks source link

Need an additional source for currency exchange rates #2

Open alerque opened 5 years ago

alerque commented 5 years ago

The FT is great for a few major world currencies, but it my attempt to use it to value my personal finances it failed on 4 out of 8 currencies in my wallet (and I haven't even touched the change jar!).

I don't know what's out there with an open API, but something that supports more world currencies would be nice (in my case at least KZT, TND, BGN, and XOF were missing).

alerque commented 5 years ago

It looks like the Foreign exchange rates API or seemingly the same data set on this API might be a good source for this, and also for historical data (#3). Also note for comparison see currencylayer (aka fixer?).

alerque commented 5 years ago

FWIW, there seem to be a lot of repackaging of the same product going on. I've found at least 3 services each open and signup only that repackage the same data with the same API. The difference seems to be the fully open services all only have a limited subset of currencies available. The upside is that they allow access to all the API features such as requesting a base currency. The subscriptions services all have the same "free" plan with 1000 API calls per month with a key, and they have much more complete currency sets, however there are restrictions on the API usage such as only allowing EUR based queries. It is of course trivially easy to do the math and rebase against a different currency, but them are the apples.

I've stepped using the script from this repo and written up a makefile recipe that parses my ledgers for a list of dates and commodities, queries any of these APIs for all the commodities on each date for which I have transactions, and updates my prices ledger with any that are missing. If anybody is interested in seeing this ping me here and I'll post it as a gist or something.