Authenticated api call to VALR - Python 3.8 - api

Question

I'm trying to make an authenticated api call to VALR crypto exchange as first step towards automated trading. They provide most of the code so I thought it would be easy even as a non coding techie. The code below does actually create the correct HMAC SHA512 signature using the API Secret provided for testing but I have a problem in passing this result along to the next section of code to request balances (starting at line 17). If I cut and paste the result/displayed 'signature' and 'timestamp' (after running the code) back into the code it does in fact work. So what changes do I need to make the code automatically pick up the signature and timestamp. The user defined function appears to keep all parameters "secret" from the rest of the code, especially after using return.
import time
import hashlib
import hmac
def sign_request( api_key_secret,timestamp, verb,path,body=""):
payload = "{}{}{}{}".format(timestamp, verb.upper(), path, body)
message = bytearray(payload, 'utf-8')
signature = hmac.new(bytearray(api_key_secret, 'utf-8'), message, digestmod=hashlib.sha512).hexdigest()
print("Signature=",signature)
print ("Timestamp",timestamp)
return signature
sign_request( verb = "GET", timestamp = int(time.time()*1000),path="/v1/account/balances",api_key_secret="4961b74efac86b25cce8fbe4c9811c4c7a787b7a5996660afcc2e287ad864363" )
import requests
url = "https://api.valr.com/v1/account/balances"
payload = {}
headers = {
'X-VALR-API-KEY': '2589fb273e86aeee10bac1445232aa302feb37e27d32c1c599abc3757599139e',
'X-VALR-SIGNATURE': 'signature',
'X-VALR-TIMESTAMP': 'timestamp'
}
response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data = payload)
print(response.text.encode('utf8'))

Answer 1

Well after some hard thinking I decided to change to using global variables. The hmac still worked fine and gave me a signature. Then I removed the quotes around signature and timestamp and realised they were both integers. I was then able to convert that signature and timestamp to a string and everything started to work perfectly. Maybe someone else will make use of this. If you want to make a POST request remember to put single quotes around anything in the {body} statement to make it a string.

Answer 2

Here is the code that I am currently using for a GET request from VALR. It's been working fine for many months. You will need to change the path and the url to correspond to whatever you are trying to get, and obviously you will need to add your_api_key and your_api_secret.
If you need to send through other request parameters like transaction types etc. then you will ned to include them in the path and the url e.g. https://api.valr.com/v1/account/transactionhistory?skip=0&limit=100&transactionTypes=MARKET_BUY&currency=ZAR
def get_orders(): # to get open orders from valr
timestamp = int(time.time()*1000)
verb = "GET"
path = "/v1/orders/open"
body = ""
api_key_secret = 'your_api_secret'
payload = "{}{}{}".format(timestamp, verb.upper(), path)
message = bytearray(payload, 'utf-8')
signature = hmac.new(bytearray(api_key_secret, 'utf-8'), message, digestmod=hashlib.sha512).hexdigest()
timestamp_str = str(timestamp)
url = "https://api.valr.com/v1/orders/open"
headers = {
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
'X-VALR-API-KEY': 'your_api_key',
'X-VALR-SIGNATURE': signature,
'X-VALR-TIMESTAMP': timestamp_str,
}
response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data=body)
dict = json.loads(response.text)
dict = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(dict)
print(dict)