Description

A simple command line interface to look up the stock quote of a given stock symbol

Example Usage:

>> stocktracker GOOG

Here are the stock prices on 2019-10-27:

Stock      Quote
=========================
GOOG       1265.1300

>> stocktracker GOOG AAPL FB

Here are the stock prices on 2019-10-27:

Stock      Quote
=========================
GOOG       1265.1300
AAPL       246.5800
FB         187.8900

>> stocktracker -a GOOG AAPL FB

Here are the stock prices on 2019-10-27:

Stock      Quote
=========================
AAPL       246.5800
FB         187.8900
GOOG       1265.1300

Code:

Full source code in GitHub

What I Learned

I only worked on this for about 5 consecutive days in short bursts (but this could easily have been done in an hour or two on a single day). I chose this project because I like command-line interfaces and I wanted to work more with the Click library.

The first step was to figure out how I would get the stock quotes. I found a nice site with a free API for this purpose - alphavantage. I signed up for a free API key and added this to my config file. I’m using configparser to read the config file. To make this into a true CLI, I added a setup.py file (so the code can be called with a simple command instead of having to type the “python” command to run this).

Assessment

I learned more about Click and ConfigParser, and how to create a setup.py file. There is a lot more that could be added to make this more robust, but it works well enough as a simple CLI proof-of-concept. This was a fun little project and I plan to use Click again for future CLI tools.