The Goxtool trading platform supports deployment of automated trading strategies/agents that will trade for you while you are logged in and running the application. However, ideally you would of course rather like to run them all the time, so that your brilliant strategies don’t miss critical shifts in the price curve. This is extra true for such a volatile currency such as Bitcoin of course.

Fortunately running Goxtool in the background is easily achieved. Since Goxtool is a console application, you can use your usual array of *nix tools to manage it. The go-to tool in this case is Screen and I had almost forgotten about it.

Screen basically lets you detach the current console and put the process in the background while it continues to run, just like if the window/termainal is still active. As with most tools under Linux, you can do a lot with screen, but for this for this purpose, you only need to know three things.

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# Start a screen session
$ screen -s mygoxsession

# Start goxtool as usual in the screen session
$ ./goxtool.py --strategy=buy.py,sell.py

# While the application is running, press 'CTRL-a' followed by 'd' to detach. Then you can logout
CTRL-a d

# At a later point, reattaching to the goxtool session is done like this
$ screen -x mygoxsession

Easy as pie! :–)

You can read a little more about screen here.

• Screen quick ref.
• Screen HOWTO