Best way to keep the IB connection open permanently with minimal manual interention?

[garber-a]

I am looking to update an old system which was running the IB Gateway client locally with the ib_insync library.

As I understand it I should proceed with ib_async as the properly maintained package going forward, however I am unclear about the best way to establish a persistent connection. Previously I had to run IB gateway on my machine, but I am looking to migrate to cloud management so would like to start to containerize everything. I also ran into issues with IB gateway restarting over the weekends which required manual intervention to unblock.

A couple questions:

(1) Is iBeam the right utility to use to avoid the weekend disconnects and the requirements to run IB gateway on the cloud machine?

(2) How do I get the ib_async connect function to utilize the connection from my running iBeam docker container ("Gateway running and authenticaed" from iBeam)?

[geepeem]

You might want to check out the following repo: https://github.com/gnzsnz/ib-gateway-docker
There are quite a few folk using it to connect to IB Gateway via Docker: once set up it is very solid! You can even have it connect to both live and paper simultaneously. VS Code one click to start / stop.
AFAIK there's no way around the weekly restart, so just do a quick stop/start before the Monday open and you're good.

[garber-a]

Thank you!

[gnzsnz]

IBC is a great utility to keep ib-gateway/TWS running. the only thing that can't be automated is MFA. AFAIK the only way to disable the weekly restart is to disable MFA on the account, which is not recommended for security reasons.

the docker image mentioned above bundles together ib-gateway/TWS with IBC in a docker container

[mattsta]

Is this still a problem for people (other than the fact it has to happen at all)?

The IBKR gateway will safely auto-restart itself nightly and doesn't require re-auth because it keeps a "weekly session cookie" internally when it restarts itself. The only error conditions are if the restart happens after your previous IP address changed which invalidates the previously generated weekly session cookie.

At end of the week, the IBKR gateway will just do a hard shutdown and fail to restart (with a slightly weird API error instead of just a more readable "this is the end of week shutdown, try again tomorrow"), then you need to restart manually and app-2FA-authorize it again anyway after Friday night.