If you have invested in Bitcoin or any other crypto-currency such as Ethereum, Litecoin, Dash or Monero and want to monitor their prices through the command line then we have an easy solution for you. Find below how you can easily get price of top crypto-currencies right inside your terminal with a single command.
Many of us spend most of our productive work time inside a terminal and find it more convenient to simply run a command to get the data we need or to perform certain actions rather than visiting a website, waiting for it to load and then performing 3-4 more clicks to achieve the same result. This is why, we like to find command line alternatives for almost everything.
In this post, we will introduce you to one such command line program which can help you retrieve the prices of top cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple etc. right inside the terminal. This program is called coinmon and is an MIT licensed open source program developed by KK Chen.
Install Pre-requisites
If you have NodeJS already installed, you can skip this step and head over to the next section. Otherwise head over to the NodeJS downloads page and grab the latest version of NodeJS suitable for your Operating System.
You may already have NodeJS installed on your system. To check whether NodeJS has been installed and is available via command line, run the command ‘node -v’ in terminal (or cmd).
$ node -v v8.2.1
Once you have confirmed that NodeJS is installed, proceed to the next step where we will install the npm module needed to check cryptocurrency prices.
Get Cryptocurrecy Prices in Command Line
Install the ‘coinmon’ npm module by running the following command in your terminal:
$ npm install --global coinmon
It will take a while for the module to get installed. Once it finishes installing, you will be able to run the command ‘coinmon’ from the command line.
Running the command ‘coinmon’ will check cryptocurrencies’ prices, changes, market cap from coinmarketcap.com and display a tabular result on your console similar to the one shown below:
If you want the prices to be displayed in any currency other than USD then you can do so too. Simply specify the currency you want to be displayed via the command line argument as shown below:
$ coinmon -c eur // convert prices to Eurodollars $ coinmon -c jpy // convert prices to the Japanese yen
List of currencies supported are as follows: AUD, BRL, CAD, CHF, CLP, CNY, CZK, DKK, EUR, GBP, HKD, HUF, IDR, ILS, INR, JPY, KRW, MXN, MYR, NOK, NZD, PHP, PKR, PLN, RUB, SEK, SGD, THB, TRY, TWD, ZAR
There are a few other command line arguments too which allow you to search for a cryptocurrency and to list a more extensive set of crytocurrency data. You can read about them on the coinmon’s GitHub page.
Cryptocurrency Price Watch
The command line utility ‘coinmon’ can be great to keep a watch on cryptocurrency if you are a Crypto investor or a Crypto enthusiast. As you are able to run it from the command line, you can even pipe the output to a different program to different kinds of comparisons.
There are many websites which allow you to keep a live watch on cryptocurrency prices. A few of them are listed below:
- Cryptowatch – https://cryptowat.ch
- CoinMarketCap – https://coinmarketcap.com
- CryptoCompare – https://www.cryptocompare.com
If you are a Bitcoin enthusiast then we recommend the following articles that will be useful if you are building a bitcoin related wesbite:
- Bitcoin Logo Designs
- Free Bitcoin Stock Photos
- WordPress Plugins for Accepting Bitcoin Payments
- Bitcoin Website Scripts and Plugins
We hope that you found our guide useful. If you are a command line power user then don’t forget to read our other guides on command line utilities: