fred-cli 1.0.0

CLI app powered by FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data)

FRED CLI

TL;DR: CLI app to interface with the FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) API.

Fancy video thanks to: asciinema

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• Installation
• Documentation
  • Search
  • About
  • Get
• License

Requirements

• Python 3.6+
• Package Dependencies:
  • tabulate
  • fred
  • click

Installation

Assuming you have Python 3.6+ installed, you can install fred-cli via pip:

pip install fred-cli

You'll also need an API key for FRED, which you can get for free via the FRED website. Once you have your API key, export an environment variable that fred-cli can use:

export FRED_API_KEY=yourkeyhere

Documentation

fred-cli supports three main methods in v1:

• search
• about
• get

Search

There are ~766,000 unique economic time series available via FRED. Luckily, fred-cli makes it easy to search through this massive list using search.

Example:

fred search gross national product

Returns:

ID	Title	Units	Freq.
GNP	Gross National Product	Bil. of $	Q
GNPA	Gross National Product	Bil. of $	A
A001RP1Q027SBEA	Gross National Product	% Chg. from Preceding Period	Q
A001RP1A027NBEA	Gross National Product	% Chg. from Preceding Period	A
MKTGNIUSA646NWDB	Gross National Income for United St	Current $	A
GNPC96	Real Gross National Product	Bil. of Chn. 2012 $	Q
A001RO1Q156NBEA	Real Gross National Product	% Chg. from Qtr. 1 Yr. Ago	Q
GNPCA	Real Gross National Product	Bil. of Chn. 2012 $	A
A001RL1A225NBEA	Real Gross National Product	% Chg. from Preceding Period	A
A001RL1Q225SBEA	Real Gross National Product	% Chg. from Preceding Period	Q
GNPDEF	Gross National Product: Implicit Pr	Index 2012=100	Q
A001RI1Q225SBEA	Gross National Product: Implicit Pr	% Chg. from Preceding Period	Q
A001RI1A225NBEA	Gross National Product: Implicit Pr	% Chg. from Preceding Period	A
MKTGNIPHA646NWDB	Gross National Income for Philippin	Current $	A

Page: 1 / 34 | next page (n), prev page (b), exit (e)

Search provides 15 results per page and pagination using user keyboard input:

• n = next page
• b = previous page
• e = to exit and issue new commands

About

The search function only provides summary information on retrieved metrics and should be thought of as an entry point. That's why fred-cli also provides an about method that fetches more detailed information on a specific metric - given its ID.

Example:

fred about GNP

Returns:

Series Info:
ID:	GNP
Title:	Gross National Product
Obs. Start:	1947-01-01
Obs. End:	2020-04-01
Frequency:	Quarterly
Units:	Billions of Dollars
Seasonal Adjustment:	Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate
Last Updated:	2020-08-27 08:00:33-05

Using the search and about method in tandem will allow users to properly discover and learn about available metrics.

Get

Finally, there's the workhorse of the CLI - the get method. This method fetches an the time series for a user specified metric - given a metric ID. Metric IDs can be found using the search method described above.

Example:

fred get GNP

Returns:

Period	GNP
2015-07-01	18560.9
2015-10-01	18611.9
2016-01-01	18684.3
2016-04-01	18874.5
2016-07-01	19043.7
2016-10-01	19306
2017-01-01	19514.1
2017-04-01	19646.8
2017-07-01	19918.7
2017-10-01	20261.5
2018-01-01	20556.8
2018-04-01	20844.2
2018-07-01	21002.7
2018-10-01	21182.6
2019-01-01	21361.8
2019-04-01	21601
2019-07-01	21820.1
2019-10-01	22028.5
2020-01-01	21804.3
2020-04-01	19616.8

get defaults to fetching five years worth of data - but users can specify a year period via the -y argument:

Example:

fred get -y 1 GNP

Returns:

Period	GNP
2019-07-01	21820.1
2019-10-01	22028.5
2020-01-01	21804.3
2020-04-01	19616.8

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2020 Aadhi Manivannan

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.