Managing Docker images#

In this section, we discuss how to install and run trade-executor Docker images.

Preface#

trade-executor is distributed as a Docker image. Trade executor Docker images are available in Github Container Registry.

The image name is ghcr.io/tradingstrategy-ai/trade-executor
The Docker image packages Python interpreter and trade-executor co`mmand
It is automatically downloaded when you run docker or docker-compose command
Always pin down the Docker image version to a known good version for yourself
There shouldn’t be need to build your own Docker image, though we provide instructions for this for developers later on
The image is distributed using Github’s Container Registry (ghcr.io) - you need to docker login to this registry to download the image

Installing Docker#

For macOS use Docker for Mac
[For Ubuntu](https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/) the condensed instructions:

sudo -i
apt install ca-certificates curl gnupg
install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
echo \
  "deb [arch="$(dpkg --print-architecture)" signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  "$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME")" stable" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
apt update
apt install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin

# Make ubuntu user to use Docker
# Note: not the safest method
usermod -aG docker ubuntu

# Restart need to change to takes effect
reboot now

Login to GHCR#

Docker images are distributed on Github Container Registry. The access is public, but you need to have an access token through your Github account.

To enable docker login to Github see how to set up Github access token to download Docker images from GHCR.

Create a personal access tokens in Developer settings of your Github account.
You need an access token to publish, install, and delete private, internal, and public packages: repo:*.

When you find your token you can do:

GITHUB_USERNAME=miohtama
# Your Personal Access Token (classic)
CR_PAT=ghp_mmc...
docker login ghcr.io --username=$GITHUB_USERNAME --password=$CR_PAT

The first run#

Start by setting up a command-line shell for the latest version of trade-executor. See here for the latest trade-executor releases.

export TRADE_EXECUTOR_VERSION=v163 && export TRADE_EXECUTOR_IMAGE=ghcr.io/tradingstrategy-ai/trade-executor:${TRADE_EXECUTOR_VERSION}
docker run $TRADE_EXECUTOR_IMAGE version

Should output:

Version: v163
Commit hash: 2bb422a35d2643265e38204af022560544294c52
Commit message: Fix build instructions

Docker Compose example#

After Docker runs from the command line, you can create a docker-compose.yml entry for your strategy. Compose configuration files are how Docker containers and instances are run.

You need to pass in local file system folders, or create a Docker volumes for

strategy/, or any path where your strategy module is
state/ where your strategy persistent state is stored
cache/ where downloaded datasets are stored
For webhook port we use 19006 in the example below. This needs to be any open ane unoccupied localhost port on your server.

Example docker-compose.yml:

version: "3.9"

# The base template for trade-executor live trading
x-trade-executor: &default-trade-executor
  image: ghcr.io/tradingstrategy-ai/trade-executor:${TRADE_EXECUTOR_VERSION}
  # All live executors have internal exception recovery mechanism,
  # If trade executor stops it must be manually restarted.
  # However webhook server stays around and can still take commands
  # even if the trade executor loop has stopped.
  restart: "no"
  mem_swappiness: 0
  volumes:
    # Map the path from where we load the strategy Python modules
    - ./strategy:/usr/src/trade-executor/strategy
    # Save the strategy execution state in the local filesystem
    - ./state:/usr/src/trade-executor/state
    # Cache the dataset downloads in the local filesystem
    - ./cache:/usr/src/trade-executor/cache
    # Save the log files to the local file system
    - ./logs:/usr/src/trade-executor/logs

  # This is the default trade-executor command to
  # launch as a daemon mode.
  # There are several subcommands.
  command: start

services:

  # This is your trade executor name
  enzyme-polygon-eth-usdc:
    <<: *default-trade-executor
    container_name: enzyme-polygon-eth-usdc
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:19006:3456"
    env_file:
      - ~/secrets/enzyme-polygon-eth-usdc-final.env

We pin down our trade-executor version using TRADE_EXECUTOR_VERSION environment variable. See the repo for stable versions. Do not use latest tag as it is unstable, unless you build the Docker image yourself.

export TRADE_EXECUTOR_VERSION=v13

Now we can try this out. We invoke hello subcommand to see that the application launches correctly.

docker-compose run enzyme-polygon-eth-usdc version

Missing env files#

If you have several services in the same docker-compose.yml and docker-compose complains about missing .env files you can simply create empty files. E.g. touch ~/pancake-eth-usd-sma-final.env.