pyfredapi - Python library for the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) API

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pyfredapi is a full featured Python library that makes it is easy to retrieve data from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) API web service. pyfredapi covers all the FRED api endpoints, and can retrieve data from FRED and ALFRED. Data can be returned as a pandas dataframe or json. Requests to the FRED API can be customized according to the parameters made available by the web service endpoints.

Documentation

The documentation is made with Sphinx and hosted on Read the Docs.

Installation

pip install pyfredapi

# install with plotting dependencies
pip install 'pyfredapi[plot]'

Quick Start

FRED API Key

Before using pyfredapi and must have an API key to the FRED API web service. You can apply for one for free on the FRED website.

You can set your API key in two ways:

• set your API key to the environment variable FRED_API_KEY
• pass it to the api_key parameter of the request function

You can set the API key as an environment variable by adding the following line to your ~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc file:

export FRED_API_KEY="your_api_key"

Using pyfredapi

Each of the FRED API endpoint namespaces is covered by a module in pyfredapi. For a deeper dive into each of the modules see the tutorials and API reference in the documentation.

• category - covers the FRED Categories endpoints
• maps - covers the FRED Maps endpoints
• release - covers the FRED Releases endpoints
• series - covers the FRED Series endpoints
• sources - covers the FRED Sources endpoints
• tags - covers the FRED Tags endpoints
• series_collection - makes handling multiple series easier

Quick start example:

import pyfredapi as pf

# api key set as environment variable
pf.get_series(series_id="GDP")

# api key passed to the function
pf.get_series(series_id="GDP", api_key="my_api_key")

Contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing to pyfredapi. Check out the contributing guide to get started.