Django currencies with historical exchange rates

This is a fairly minimal Django app that renders amounts of currencies, stores historical exchange rates in the database, and performs currency conversion.

When working with any historical multi-currency data, one often needs to be able to perform exchange rate calculations with historical rates. This allows the conversion to be accurately reproduced in the future.

Exchange Rates are stored in a simple database table, with 1 row per rate per date. Conversions can be done directly, or across a base currency using 2 rates.

Formatting is defined by iso4217. Exchange Rate data can be sourced from:

• The European ECB Reference Rates. Public, provides rates for 41 currencies against EUR.
• openexchangerates.org. Requires (free) registration, provides 169 currencies against USD.

Installation

1. Install django-historical-currencies in your Python environment.
2. Add historical_currencies to INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.py.
3. Import yesterday's exchange rates to get started: manage.py import_ecb_exchangerates --daily.
4. Configure a periodic task (e.g. cron, systemd timer, celery beat) to import daily exchange rates.

Settings

• MAX_EXCHANGE_RATE_AGE: How many days old can an exchange rate be treated as current?

Optional settings, only required for OpenExchangeRates.org import:

• OPEN_EXCHANGE_RATES_APP_ID: OpenExchangeRates App ID.
• OPEN_EXCHANGE_RATES_BASE_CURRENCY: Base currency.

Usage

In code, amounts can be converted using the historical_currencies.exchange.exchange() method.

In templates, this module represents financial amounts as tuple of (Decimal, str(currency-code)). The recommended approach is to add properties to your Django models to return this tuple for amounts.

In a template the amount can be displayed or converted:

{% load currency_format %}

Assuming my_amount = (Decimal(10), 'USD')
Display:
{{ my_amount|currency }}
-> 10.00 USD

Exchange at the latest rate:
{{ my_amount|exchange:"EUR" }}
-> 9.06 EUR

Currency Selectors:

There are two template tags to help render currency selectors. A high-level one that renders HTML:

{% load currency_choices %}

<select>
  {% currency_choices_options selected="USD" %}
</select>

And a low-level one that returns a list of currencies:

{% load currency_choices %}

<select>
  {% currency_choices_list as currency_choices %}
  {% for code, name in currency_choices %}
    <option value="{{ code }}">{{ name }}</option>
  {% endfor %}
</select>

License

This Django app is available under the terms of the ISC license, see LICENSE.