transferegovpy 0.1.1

Access the TransfereGov open data APIs from Python

transferegovpy

Access the open data APIs of TransfereGov, the Brazilian federal government's platform for transfers to states, municipalities and civil society, from Python.

The platform publishes three APIs, covering 48 tables in all:

Module	Covers	Tables
transferenciasespeciais	Special transfers, created by Constitutional Amendment 105/2019 for individual parliamentary amendments	14
fundoafundo	Fund-to-fund transfers, from federal funds directly to state, district and municipal funds	21
ted	Decentralized credit between federal bodies (termo de execução descentralizada)	13

All three are PostgREST services, so this package exposes their filtering, column selection and ordering directly, rather than wrapping each table in a function of its own.

This is the Python sibling of transferegovr; the two cover the same ground with the same semantics.

Installation

pip install transferegovpy

A progress bar during long collections needs one extra:

pip install "transferegovpy[progress]"

Getting started

import transferegovpy as tg

tg.modules()
tg.tables("ted")
tg.fields("ted", "plano_acao")

get() retrieves rows. Name each filter after the column it applies to:

tg.get("ted", "plano_acao", aa_ano_plano_acao=2024)

A bare value means "equals", a bare list means "is one of", and the operators from tg.operators() cover the rest:

tg.get(
    "ted", "plano_acao",
    aa_ano_plano_acao=tg.gte(2024),
    sigla_unidade_descentralizada=["CNPq", "CAPES"],
    tx_objeto_plano_acao=tg.ilike("*pesquisa*"),
    select=["id_plano_acao", "vl_total_plano_acao", "dt_inicio_vigencia"],
    order="vl_total_plano_acao.desc",
    limit=20,
)

Several conditions on one column go in a list, and the API combines them with AND:

tg.get(
    "fundoafundo", "plano_acao",
    data_inicio_vigencia_plano_acao=[tg.gte("2024-01-01"), tg.lt("2025-01-01")],
)

If a column name ever collides with one of the keyword arguments, pass it through filters=:

tg.get("ted", "plano_acao", filters={"select": "something"})

Size first, download second

The service returns at most 1000 rows per request, and these tables are not small — the largest holds over a million rows, which is more than a thousand requests. Ask before you fetch:

tg.count("fundoafundo", "gestao_financeira_lancamentos")
# 1115444

To size everything at once:

tg.tables(counts=True).sort_values("rows", ascending=False)

limit counts rows, not pages. Anything above 1000 is collected page by page, in an explicit order so that pages cannot overlap or skip rows, and the total collected is checked against what the API reported:

import math

plans = tg.get("ted", "plano_acao", limit=math.inf)

tg.metadata(plans)["total_rows"]
tg.metadata(plans)["pages"]

Types

Columns are typed from the API's own schema rather than inferred, so a column that happens to be entirely null on one page does not change dtype on the next:

plans = tg.get("ted", "plano_acao", limit=5)

plans.dtypes["dt_inicio_vigencia"]   # datetime64[ns]
plans.dtypes["in_forma_execucao_direta"]  # boolean
plans.dtypes["id_plano_acao"]        # Int64

Identifiers declared as bigint come back as pandas' nullable Int64, which holds the full 64-bit range — the R sibling has to use a float for these, because R has no nullable integer that wide.

Caching

Responses are cached for an hour in the session's temporary directory, so nothing is written outside the session unless you ask for it. To keep them between sessions:

tg.cache_dir("~/.cache/transferegovpy")

or set TRANSFEREGOVPY_CACHE_DIR in your environment. tg.cache_clear() empties it.

Two things that bite

• The 1000-row cap is silent. Ask for more and the service returns 1000 rows with a 206, and nothing in the body says the result was cut short. Only Content-Range does. limit counts rows and is met by fetching pages.
• Offset pagination needs an order. A Postgres query without ORDER BY has no defined row order, so page two can repeat page one and skip rows elsewhere. Every request this package sends carries an explicit order, and the rows collected are checked against the total the API reported.

Configuration

tg.configure(
    requests_per_minute=30,   # default 60
    max_tries=6,              # default 4
    timeout=120,              # seconds, default 60
    validate=False,           # accept columns the packaged schema does not know
)

Column names are in Portuguese

Table names, column names and categorical values belong to the API and are left as the government publishes them. The package's own functions, arguments and documentation are in English.

Related

• transferegovr — the same APIs from R.
• obrasgovr — the ObrasGov public works API, which carries the coordinates TransfereGov does not.

Official documentation

• https://docs.api.transferegov.gestao.gov.br/transferenciasespeciais/
• https://docs.api.transferegov.gestao.gov.br/fundoafundo/
• https://docs.api.transferegov.gestao.gov.br/ted/

Citation

Each release is archived on Zenodo. The DOI above is the concept DOI: it always resolves to the latest version. To cite the exact version you used, take its own DOI from the Zenodo record.

@software{transferegovpy,
  title   = {transferegovpy: Access the TransfereGov open data APIs from Python},
  author  = {Leite, André and Vasconcelos, Hugo and Bezerra, Diogo and
             Wasiliew, Marcos and Amorim, Carlos and Nascimento Barreto, Júlia},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.21729827},
  url     = {https://github.com/StrategicProjects/transferegovpy}
}

Releasing

Publication uses Trusted Publishing, so no API token is stored anywhere. Register the publisher once on PyPI, under Your projects → transferegovpy → Publishing, or as a pending publisher before the first upload:

Field	Value
PyPI Project Name	transferegovpy
Owner	StrategicProjects
Repository name	transferegovpy
Workflow name	publish.yaml
Environment name	pypi

The same on test.pypi.org, which is a separate service with its own account and its own publisher registration. The environment name is arbitrary and only has to match the workflow, so pypi works there too.

Then:

# a dry run to TestPyPI
gh workflow run publish.yaml -f target=testpypi

# the real thing
gh release create v0.1.0 --title "transferegovpy 0.1.0" --notes-file CHANGELOG.md

License

MIT