Install alpaca_trading_api

Getting Started with Alpaca
1 
I have tried to install alpaca_trade_api several times with pip, and each time the following error occurs:
Collecting PyYAML==6.0 (from alpaca_trade_api)
  Using cached PyYAML-6.0.tar.gz (124 kB)
  Installing build dependencies ... done
  Getting requirements to build wheel ... error
  error: subprocess-exited-with-error
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  × Getting requirements to build wheel did not run successfully.
  │ exit code: 1
  ╰─> [54 lines of output]
      running egg_info
      writing lib\PyYAML.egg-info\PKG-INFO
      writing dependency_links to lib\PyYAML.egg-info\dependency_links.txt
      writing top-level names to lib\PyYAML.egg-info\top_level.txt

AttributeError: cython_sources
      [end of output]
  note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.
error: subprocess-exited-with-error
× Getting requirements to build wheel did not run successfully.
│ exit code: 1
╰─> See above for output.

note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.
To solve it, I performed the following actions on the advice of GPT and Bard:
•	Uninstalled and reinstalled PyYAML (with pip and by downloading the .whl file directly from the website - https://pypi.org/project/PyYAML/), Pandas, and Cython.
•	Updated pip
But I'm still stuck. Can you tell me why?
I am using Python 3.12 64-bit.
2

@Camillo The alpaca-trading-api doesn’t support python versions above 3.8 and is understandable it may run into install issues with version 3.12. You can either load python 3.8 or use the newer alpaca-py SDK instead. That should work.

3

Thank you so much, do you suggest to use the older version of python or the newer alpaca-py? Because I’ve seen on the web that there are lot of tutorials that refer to alpaca-trading-api but none to alpaca-py…I don’t know if there’s a difference, but I had already installed Alpaca-py, and some commands that required the import of Alpaca-trade-api were not working.

4

@Camillo I personally use the original alpaca-trading-api partly because I have a lot of code that used that SDK but also because it’s a bit more ‘friendly’. What I mean by that is the newer alpaca-py SDK expects just about everything to be an object whereas alpaca-trading-api accepts simple strings for most inputs and parameters.

Especially if you are using examples which use the alpaca-trading-api SDK you may want to revert to an earlier supported version of python.

Do you by chance use Google Colab. I highly recommend that as a very convenient way to access all the Alpaca APIs in a python notebook environment. It’s free and easy to load the SDKs and are pretty much guaranteed to work using the default Colab notebook versions.