Singer Tap - US Federal Reserve API

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Setup
• Usage

Overview

What is FRED? Short for Federal Reserve Economic Data, FRED is an online database consisting of hundred of thousands of economic data time series from scores of national, international, public, and private sources. FRED, created and maintained by the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, goes far beyond simply providing data: It combines data with a powerful mix of tools that help the user understand, interact with, display, and disseminate the data. In essence, FRED helps users tell their data stories. The purpose of this article is to guide the potential (or current) FRED user through the various aspects and tools of the database.

Setup

If you are planning to make modifications to this project or you would like to access it before it has been indexed on PyPi. I would recommend you either install this project in editable mode or do a local install. For those of you, who want to make modifications to this project. I would recommend you install the library in editable mode.

If you want to install the library in editable mode, make sure to run the setup.py file, so you can install any dependencies you may need. To run the setup.py file, run the following command in your terminal.

pip install -e .

If you don't plan to make any modifications to the project but still want to use it across your different projects, then do a local install.

pip install .

This will install all the dependencies listed in the setup.py file. Once done you can use the library wherever you want.

Usage

Step 1 - Install in Virtual Environment

We recommend using a virtualenv.

> py -m venv venv/tap-federal-reserve
> venv/tap-federal-reserve/Scripts/activate
> pip install -e .

Step 2 - Specify Configuration Values

In the config.json file you will need to provide a few things in order to get the Tap running. Some of the values are required while some are optional. The both the required and optional arguments are the following:

{
  // REQUIRED: Should be used on first sync to indicate how far back to grab records.
  "start_date": "2021-06-20",

  // REQUIRED: Your Federal Reserve API Key.
  "api_key": "<FRED_API_KEY>",

  // REQUIRED: The Series Id you want to pull. For example, `BOPGN`.
  "series_id": "BOPGN",

  // OPTIONAL: The starting period you want to pull data. Make sure
  // it's an ISO-Format Date.
  "series_start_date": "2020-12-31",

  // OPTIONAL: The end period you want to pull data. Make sure
  // it's an ISO-Format Date.
  "series_end_date": "2021-01-21"
}

Step 3 - Run the Script

Discovery Mode:

To run the script, in discovery mode, open up your terminal and run the following command after activating your virtual environment:

tap-federal-reserve --config sample.config.json --discover

Sync Mode:

To run the script, in sync mode, open up your terminal and run the following command after activating your virtual environment:

tap-federal-reserve --config sample.config.json