Daily Currency Updates: ECB Rates on Autopilot

About the Extension

The pound moved again this morning. The Swiss franc did too. Your shop still runs on the rate somebody typed in three weeks ago. If you sell across borders, you either update those conversion factors by hand or you accept that your foreign currency prices are quietly wrong.

The problem

Shopware converts foreign currencies through one fixed factor per currency. Somebody enters it once. After that it just sits there and ages. A few weeks of drift means a few percent of margin gone, or prices sitting well above the competition. You usually notice when a customer asks about it or when finance starts querying an invoice.

The solution

This plugin fetches the official euro reference rates published by the European Central Bank and writes them into the conversion factor of every currency in your shop whose ISO code appears in the ECB list. Once a day, at an hour you choose. The euro stays the base with a factor of 1.0. Install it, activate it, done: the first fetch runs the moment you activate.

What's in it for you

You stop maintaining rates by hand. No checking a rate site, no copying numbers into currency settings, no week that quietly gets skipped. The plugin does it every day, whether anyone remembers or not.

Your prices rest on a source nobody argues with. The ECB publishes its euro reference rates on every working day, in public. When a customer or your accountant asks where the rate came from, the answer takes one sentence.

You decide when it runs. Pick any full hour between 00:00 and 23:00 server time. The default is 06:00, early enough to be ready before the selling day starts. If your system is quieter at night, move it there.

Foreign currencies are ready straight away. On installation the plugin creates 29 internationally traded currencies if your shop does not have them yet: USD, GBP, CHF, JPY, SEK, PLN and more, each with ISO code and symbol. Currencies you already use stay exactly as they are, and nothing gets duplicated.

One click when you cannot wait. The configuration page carries an "Update currencies" button. It fetches the rates right away instead of waiting for the next daily run. Handy before a price review or straight after installation.

For your IT team it is a small plugin. One outbound call per update, no personal data, no custom database table and no extra query in the checkout.

How the plugin works

A scheduled task wakes up once an hour and checks whether your chosen time has been reached. If it has, and no update has run today, it downloads the ECB file eurofxref-daily.xml, reads the rates and writes the factor onto every currency with a matching ISO code. Every other wake up that day does nothing at all and makes no outbound connection. Currencies the ECB does not cover are left untouched.

Beyond the daily run there are two manual routes: the button on the plugin configuration page and the console command "bin/console swp-ecb:currency", which you can hang off your own cron job or deployment. All three routes use the same logic, so there is no second version of the truth in your system.

Typical use cases

A shop selling into the UK and Switzerland. GBP and CHF move noticeably against the euro. Instead of correcting them once a quarter, both rates come along every night.

A B2B merchant with a USD price list. Buyers in the United States see prices based on this morning's rate, not on the one from last year's catalogue.

A shop with Scandinavian sales channels. SEK, NOK and DKK are refreshed in the same run as everything else, so nobody transcribes three rates by hand.

A team with its own deployment rhythm. The console command slots into an existing cron job if you would rather not rely on the Shopware scheduler for this.

Technical facts for your IT team

Shopware 6.7, PHP 8.2 or newer, requires the SimpleXML PHP extension. The plugin creates no database table of its own and changes no Shopware table structure. It writes only the standard "factor" field of a currency through the Data Abstraction Layer, and on installation it adds missing currencies as ordinary Shopware records.

External connections: exactly one. An HTTPS GET to the public ECB rate file on www.ecb.europa.eu, with no credentials and a 20 second timeout. Nothing is sent to the ECB, and no personal data is processed, stored or logged. If you want to stop the outbound call entirely, switch off the master toggle or the daily update, and no request leaves your server.

Incoming rate values are checked before they reach your shop: negative, non finite and implausibly large values are discarded. An ECB outage is caught and logged, so neither the message worker nor the shop stops because of it. The manual update sits behind its own privilege in the roles administration, and without that privilege the button stays locked. No storefront template is overridden, no extra query is added to the checkout, and the fetch runs in the background rather than in a customer request.

To be honest

The ECB publishes reference rates on banking days only. At weekends and on public holidays the rate from the last working day stays in place, by design, and nothing can speed that up. If you need trading grade rates by the second, or your own markup per currency, this plugin is the wrong tool: it writes the reference rate and nothing else.

The automatic update needs a running scheduled task worker. Without one you are down to the button or the console command. And the 29 bundled currencies carry English names such as "US Dollar" in your shop's system language. Rename them in the currency settings if that does not fit, and the plugin will leave the name alone from then on.

If you are still updating exchange rates by hand today, give it a try.

Legal notice

We accept no liability for legal requirements. Please check the use of this plugin with a qualified legal advisor.