Gekko is a free and open source Bitcoin TA trading and backtesting platform that connects to popular Bitcoin exchanges. It is written in javascript and runs on nodejs
For the past couple of days I've been playing around with Gekko trading bot installed on my laptop (Windows 10), I have made a few trades and experimented with a couple of strategies. First impressions are promising. See: Simple BTC Trading Bot Gekko - First Impressions
Running a trading bot on a laptop is fun, but if you are looking for a bot 24/7monitoring market and executing trades, either you should keep your PC turned on 24/7 or you could set up a cheap VPS and setup bot on it.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links to cloud hosting companies like Linode and Vultr, by clicking on links on this page and by making a purchase on cloud hosting sites, I will earn an affiliate income at no cost to you.
As I have a couple of VPS from Linode, my first idea was to test this setup on Linode VPS, but fortunately, I found a cool tutorial How to setup VPS on Vultr.com and run Gekko by Pushkar Nagle
As I had little clue what Vultr.com hosting is - I decided to purchase cheapest VPS (they kind of have VPS for $2.50 but at time I setup a cloud hosting at Vultr.com the cheapest I was offered was at $5/mo, still cheap)
Here is what I bought for $5/mo :
- CPU: 1 vCore
- RAM: 1024 MB
- Storage: 25 GB SSD
seems enough to run dozens of Gekko's on it
Location for server Amsterdam (Amsterdam is a great bet for European customers) and deployed Ubuntu 16.04 on it. I followed Pushkar's advice and installed GUI, and here is how:
- Go to Management area of that VPS machine on Vultr.com.
- Open 'View Console'
- Login with root and the default password provided.
- Follow this tutorial to install GUI Desktop on this VPS https://www.vultr.com/docs/install-gui-environment-for-ubuntu
- After installing above desktop and rebooting, you might struggle to find the terminal. Click on icon at left-bottom corner, open Run
- Type xterm and hit enter.
- Install 'lxterminal' with this command - apt-get install lxterminal
- Close xterm and run lxterminal via Accessories > Byodu Terminal
- You will need to install Nodejs before installing Gekko. Gekko requires version > 6. You can install it by executing below commands- curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo -E bash - and sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
- Check npm version before proceeding to install Gekko by npm -v. If it is < 4.5, then Gekko might not run. Run npm install npm -g to update npm to latest version.
- Install Gekko as given in this tutorial -https://gekko.wizb.it/docs/installation/installing_gekko.html
Now you can run Gekko in UI mode or via command line. Alternatively, you can also install VNC services to access this VPS remotely. Else, default console facility of Vultr is already there.
Vultr dashboard
Follow the red arrow to launch console
Gekko launched via console
Amazing, now I don't have to worry to leave my laptop powered on - the cloud is up and running.