finlight-client (Ruby)

The official Ruby client for the finlight.me API — financial news with sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and real-time streaming.

📚 Full API documentation: docs.finlight.me

Features

• REST API: search articles, fetch single articles by link, list sources
• Real-time streaming: enhanced and raw article streams over WebSocket
• Resilient by default: request retries with exponential backoff; WebSocket auto-reconnect, keepalive with pong watchdog, proactive connection rotation, and rate-limit handling
• Webhook support: HMAC-SHA256 signature verification with replay protection
• Minimal dependencies: stdlib Net::HTTP and OpenSSL, plus the pure-Ruby websocket-driver

Requires Ruby 3.2+.

Installation

# Gemfile
gem "finlight-client"

Or directly:

gem install finlight-client

Quick Start

require "finlight/client"

client = Finlight::Client.new(api_key: ENV["FINLIGHT_API_KEY"])

response = client.articles.fetch_articles(query: "nvidia", page_size: 10)
response.articles.each { |article| puts "[#{article.source}] #{article.title}" }

REST API

Search articles

See the query language reference for the full query syntax. Parameters are snake_case keywords; they map 1:1 to the camelCase API fields.

response = client.articles.fetch_articles(
  query: '(ticker:AAPL OR ticker:NVDA) AND "Elon Musk"',
  tickers: %w[AAPL NVDA],
  from: "2025-01-01",
  include_content: true,
  include_entities: true,
  order_by: "publishDate",
  order: "DESC",
  page_size: 20
)

response.articles.each do |article|
  puts "#{article.publish_date} #{article.title} (#{article.sentiment})"
end

Fetch a single article by link

article = client.articles.fetch_article_by_link(
  link: "https://www.reuters.com/technology/example",
  include_content: true
)

List sources

sources = client.sources.get_sources
defaults = sources.select(&:is_default_source)

Real-time streaming

connect blocks and reconnects automatically until you call stop; use connect_async to run it on a background thread. The enhanced stream delivers articles with sentiment and entities; the raw stream (client.raw_websocket) delivers unenriched articles with minimal latency.

websocket = client.websocket
websocket.connect(tickers: %w[AAPL NVDA], extended: true) do |article|
  puts article.title
end

Custom stream options:

websocket = client.websocket(
  takeover: true, # take over an existing connection for the same key
  on_close: ->(code, reason) { puts "closed: #{code} #{reason}" }
)
thread = websocket.connect_async(query: "bitcoin") { |article| puts article.title }
# ...
websocket.stop
thread.join

If the server permanently rejects the connection (close code 1008), connect raises Finlight::BlockedError — reconnecting will not help; contact support.

Webhooks

Verify incoming webhooks with the raw (unparsed) request body:

# e.g. in a Rails controller
def webhook
  article = Finlight::WebhookService.construct_event(
    request.raw_post,
    request.headers["X-Webhook-Signature"],
    ENV["WEBHOOK_SECRET"],
    request.headers["X-Webhook-Timestamp"]
  )
  Rails.logger.info("New article: #{article.title}")
  head :ok
rescue Finlight::WebhookVerificationError
  head :bad_request
end

Configuration

Option	Default	Description
base_url:	https://api.finlight.me	REST endpoint
wss_url:	wss://wss.finlight.me	WebSocket endpoint
timeout:	5	Per-request and connect timeout in seconds
retry_count:	3	Total attempts for retryable failures (429/5xx)
logger:	stderr, WARN	Any stdlib-compatible Logger

client = Finlight::Client.new(
  api_key: api_key,
  timeout: 10,
  retry_count: 5,
  logger: Logger.new($stdout, level: Logger::INFO)
)

Development

bundle install
bundle exec rake        # run the test suite

Verification against the real API

The local/ directory is gitignored and holds smoke runners, mirroring the sibling clients — keep credentials in the environment, never in code.

# One-shot smoke: REST endpoints + 30s article stream
FINLIGHT_API_KEY=sk_... bundle exec ruby local/smoke.rb

# REST integration tests (auto-skipped when the key is not set)
FINLIGHT_API_KEY=sk_... bundle exec rspec spec/integration

Optional: FINLIGHT_BASE_URL / FINLIGHT_WSS_URL to target dev.

License

MIT