less-stupid-betfair is designed to make it easy as possible to interact with the Betfair API from Scala code.

Getting started using the Betfair API is not quite as straightforward as you might be used to. Betfair uses Mutual TLS to encrypt communication between client and server so as well as username/password you'll need a self-signed certificate registered with your Betfair account.

Betfair themselves provide pretty good documentation on this. If you don't want to bother reading their docs, however, you can just use the tools/certs/gen-key-stores.sh script. This will prompt you for some details and then produce a client-2048.crt file that you should upload to your Betfair account. It wil also produce a client-2047.p12 file which you'll use to create a Java Key Store for encrypting the requests made to Betfair.

You'll need three credentials for accessing the Betfair API:

• username
• password
• application key

The username and password are the same ones you'd use to log in to Betfair's website. The application key is available via an API call. Yes, that's right, in order to access the Betfair API you need to use the Betfair API...

Betfair provide a way around this - The Accounts API Demo Tool - to use it:

• Visit the tool site
• Invoke the getDeveloperAppKeys call
• Grab the delayed key

The delayed key is exactly what it's name suggests - it provides you the live data... just delayed by a couple of minutes. It's important to use the delayed key until you're ready to go into production.

Copy the .env.template and name the new file .env Fill in the missing details using the information above:

BETFAIR_USERNAME = <Your Betfair username>
BETFAIR_PASSWORD = <Your Betfair password>
BETFAIR_APPLICATION_KEY = <The application key you retrieved above>
BETFAIR_CERT_FILE = <The absolute path to the `client-2048.crt` file you created above>
BETFAIR_CERT_PASSWORD = <The password you provided when creating the client certificate>

To confirm you're able to correctly authenticate with the Betfair API run one (or more) of the examples. They'll pull their configuration from the .env file and if authentication fails you should receive some meaningful error messages to point you in the right direction (or, of course, you can raise a new issue).

To confirm you can authenticate and stream data:

sbt example-streams-api/run