Connecting to Interactive Brokers API with Java

The hardest part of creating your own automated trading system (ATS) is starting. This article is the first step of creating ATS. API provides great flexibility in implementing your automated trading ideas, all of its functionality runs through TWS or IB Gateway. This means that you must have a TWS account with IB, and that you must have your TWS/IB Gateway running in order for the API to work.

This step takes you out to the IB download API website at interactivebrokers.github.io

1. Download twsapi_macunix.n.m.jar to your computer. I use version 9.71.
       (where n and m are the major and minor version numbers respectively.)
2. Access the command line terminal.
       (On a MAC from the Applications menu. First select Utilities then select Terminal.)
3. At the command line, extract the contents of the jar file by typing, where n.m is your version:
       jar xf twsapi_macunix.n.m.jar
   

   Fig.1: OSX Terminal window with unpacking command

4. Open Netbeans and create new project
      (File-> New Project -> Java Application -> YourProjectName -> Finish)
5. Add JavaClient source package folder
      (Right click your project -> Properties -> Source -> Add Folder -> ../IBJts/source/JavaClient  )

Fig.2: NetBeans Project Properties window

Connecting to API

Now when we are done with installation we can continue to actually connecting to our account. In our package we create two classes. Logger.java and API.java. We creating Logger.java, because its parameter in ApiController constructor method.

In logger we implement all abstract methods. In our case it’s just method log().