Skip to content

pyfredapi

pyfredapi is a Python library that makes it is easy to retrieve data from the 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 as json. Requests to the FRED API can be customized according to the parameters made available by the web service endpoints.

Installation

pyfredapi can be installed via pip.

pip install pyfredapi

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

FRED API Key

Before you can use pyfredapi you 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 :code:FRED_API_KEY
  • pass it to the :code: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"

Quick Start

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 documentation in the sidebar.

  • 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 pyfreadpi as pf

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

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