Coinbase

The official Node.js library for the Coinbase API.

Features

• Full Test coverage.
• Support for both API Key + Secret and OAuth 2 authentication.
• Convenient methods for making calls to the API.
• Automatic parsing of API responses into relevant Javascript objects.
• Adheres to the nodejs error-first callback protocol.
• Continuous Integration testing against node 0.10, 0.11, and 0.12.

Installation

npm install coinbase

Version Compatibility

Version	GitHub repository
1.0.x	This repository
0.1.x	mateodelnorte/coinbase

Npm coinbase package name used to refer to the unofficial coinbase library maintained by Matt Walters. Matt graciously allowed us to use the name for this package instead. You can still find that package on Github. Thanks, Matt.

Quick Start

The first thing you'll need to do is sign up for coinbase.

API Key + Secret

If you're writing code for your own Coinbase account, enable an API key. Next, create a Client object for interacting with the API:

var Client = require('coinbase').Client;
var client = new Client({'apiKey': mykey, 'apiSecret': mysecret});

OAuth2

If you're writing code that will act on behalf of another user, start by creating a new OAuth 2 application. You will need to do some work to obtain OAuth credentials for your users; while outside the scope of this document, please refer to our OAuth 2 tutorial and documentation. Once you have these credentials, create a client:

var Client = require('coinbase').Client;
var client = new Client({
                          'apiKey'       : mykey,
                          'apiSecret'    : mysecret,
                          'accessToken'  : accessToken,
                          'refreshToken' : refreshToken
                        });

Making API Calls

With a client instance, you can now make API calls. We've included some examples below, but in general the library has Javascript prototypes for each of the objects described in our REST API documentation. These classes each have methods for making the relevant API calls; for instance, coinbase.model.Transaction.complete maps to the complete bitcoin request API endpoint. The comments of each method in the code references the endpoint it implements. Each API method returns an object representing the JSON response from the API.

Listing available accounts

var coinbase = require('coinbase');
var client   = new coinbase.Client({'apiKey': mykey, 'apiSecret': mysecret});

client.getAccounts(function(err, accounts) {
  accounts.forEach(function(acct) {
    console.log('my bal: ' + acct.balance.amount + ' for ' + acct.name);
  });
});

Get Balance from an Account Id

var Account   = require('coinbase').model.Account;
var myBtcAcct = new Account(client, {'id': '<SOME_ACCOUNT_ID>'});

myBtcAcct.getBalance(function(err, bal) {
  console.log('bal: ' + bal.amount + ' currency: ' + bal.currency);
});

Selling bitcoin

var args = {
  "qty": "12"
};
account.sell(args, function(err, xfer) {
  console.log('my xfer id is: ' + xfer.id);
});

Sending bitcoin

var args = {
  "to": "user1@example.com",
  "amount": "1.234",
  "notes": "Sample transaction for you"
};
account.sendMoney(args, function(err, txn) {
  console.log('my txn id is: ' + txn.id);
});

Requesting bitcoin

var args = {
  "from": "user1@example.com",
  "amount": "1.234",
  "notes": "Sample transaction for you"
};
account.requestMoney(args, function(err, txn) {
  console.log('my txn id is: ' + txn.id);
});

Listing current transactions

account.getTransactions(null, null, function(err, txns) {
  txns.forEach(function(txn) {
    console.log('my txn status: ' + txn.status);
  });
});

Checking bitcoin prices

client.getBuyPrice({'qty': 100, 'currency': 'USD'}, function(err, obj) {
  console.log('total amount: ' + obj.total.amount);
});

Error Handling

Errors are thrown for invalid arguments but are otherwise returned as the first argument to callback functions.

Errors contain type properties so that you can route the error to the right handler code. The possible types are:

Type	Description
AuthenticationError	returned if there was an authentication error
InvalidAccessToken	returned when the current access token is no longer valid
ExpiredAccessToken	returned when the current access token is expired
TokenRefreshError	returned when there is a failure refreshing the access token
TwoFactorTokenRequired	returned when a user's Two Factor Auth token needs to be included in the request
APIError	returned for errors related to interacting with the Coinbase API server

acct.getBalance(function(err, bal) {
  switch (err.type) {
    case 'ExpiredAccessToken':
      // use the client.refresh API to get a new access_token
      break;
    case 'InvalidAccessToken':
      //handle error
      break;
    case 'AuthenticationError':
      //handle error
      break;
    }
});

Errors are always of the type Error and can print a trace:

acct.getBalance(function(err, bal) {
  if (err) console.log('Where did this error come from?\n' + err.stack);
});

Errors that are related to an http request will have a response field with the entire http response:

acct.getBalance(function(err, bal) {
  if (err) console.log('http error code: ' + err.response.statusCode);
});

Testing / Contributing

Any and all contributions are welcome! The process is simple:

1. Fork this repo
2. Make your changes and add tests
3. Run the test suite
4. Submit a pull request.

Tests are run via mocha and nock. To run the tests, clone the repository and then:

npm install

npm test

You can also run the tests against various node environments using the Dockerfile.example file.

1. cp Dockerfile.example Dockerfile
2. edit Dockerfile and uncomment the node version that interests you
3. [sudo] docker build -t coinbase-node .
4. [sudo] docker run -it coinbase-node

More Documentation

You can generate html documentation by running the command:

npm install && npm run docs

Open generated html files in docs/ dir with a browser.