Betfair Data

Simple script to download live market ladder data of a single market from Betfair and store it into an SQLite database. In addition, you can convert the downloaded data into a Parquet file, which has a much smaller size and faster loading times.

Install

Install the Python requirement packages with the following command.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run

To run the script, first, export the Betfair credentials details as environment variables.

export BETFAIR_USERNAME=<betfair_username>
export BETFAIR_PASSWORD=<betfair_password>
export BETFAIR_APP_KEY=<betfair_app_key>
export BETFAIR_CERT_FILE=<path_to_the_betfair_certificate_file>
export BETFAIR_CERT_KEY_FILE=<path_to_the_betfair_certificate_key_file>

In the above code, substitute the placeholders, like <betfair_username> with your details.

Then, invoke the script using Python.

python record_market_ladder.py <market_id>

Here, <market_id> is the ID of the market whose live market ladder data you wish to download.

To terminate the program, press Ctrl + C.

For more information on how to use the script, you may use the help flag.

python record_market_ladder.py --help

It is also possible to run several recording tasks in the background by using the following command.

cat market_ids.txt | xargs -I market_id screen -d -m bash -c "python record_market_ladder.py market_id"

Here, market_ids.txt is a file containing a list of market IDs, like in the following example.

1.160287874
1.160287758
1.160287990
1.160288106

There will be one recording task for each market ID in the list.

To convert a zipped SQL file outputed by the record_market_ladder.py script to a Parquet file, which is much smaller in size and has faster loading times, you can use the sql_to_parquet.py script.

python sql_to_parquet.py file.zip

Here, file.zip is the zipped SQL file outputed by the record_market_ladder.py script.

For more information on how to use the script, you may use the help flag.

python sql_to_parquet.py --help

To convert multiple files in a folder, you can using the following conventient command.

find <folder_with_zipped_sql_files> -name "*.zip" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I file python sql_to_parquet.py file