Forex - European Central Bank (ECB) exchange rates for Elixir

Hey, just released a small library called Forex, to retrieve the European Central Bank daily exchange rates.

The idea behind the library is to provide a simple, no API keys, no authentication, no rate limits, just a simple Elixir library that fetches the data from the European Central Bank and caches it for later use.

With this said take into account this is not aimed at building any type of transactional app, financial applications or any type of application that relies on to the second foreign exchange rates. The reference rates from the ECB are usually updated at around 16:00 CET every working day. This is useful for information purposes, for example, you might want to show on your job board how much is the role salary range in the user’s local currency, etc.

 

I set this up for a prop trading firm I’m part of, and we just pull the ECB XML daily using Finch and parse it with SweetXml. Didn’t need anything fancy—just a simple GenServer caching the rates for our internal tools. If you care about fault tolerance or retries, wrapping it in Tesla with middleware works fine too. Definitely overkill for small apps, though.