Troubleshooting/FAQ

In this section I will put issues/questions users faced, so it might help new users too.

Dos And Donts

Right Way to Ingest Data

Old Zipline users are used to do this with the zipline cli. For now, avoid it.

Don’t use this to ingest:

zipline ingest -b alpaca_api

I changed the way we ingest new data bundles. please refer to the Alpaca Data Bundle and read iut again.

zipline-trader.yaml file issues

When using the Alpaca bundle, you must pass credentials to the Alpaca servers. It can’t be avoided.

The easiest way to do this is by using a local file. The format is not important, I chose yaml. It’s simple.

Make sure you put the alpaca credentials in the right place

First make sure the name of the file is zipline-trader.yaml. (avoid mistakes like using .yml postfix)

Put it in the right location - your root python folder. not inside the zipline-trader folder.

SQLite file doesn’t exist.

If you happen to get this error when trying to work with data you just downloaded:

ValueError: SQLite file '/home/ubuntu/.zipline/data/alpaca_api/2020-12-07T02;06;17.365878/assets-7.sqlite' doesn't exist.

It means you didn’t define the ZIPLINE_ROOT correctly. You need to make sure this environment variable is defined for every python code you execute.

Mac OS

Currently we have issues installing on Mac OS due to usage of Bcolz. I will be resolved eventually. If anyone from the community want to resolve this for everyone else - you are welcome.

In the meantime - use a linux docker container to bypass that.