Crate fred_rs

fred-rs is a simple interface for accessing the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's FRED API.

FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data)

FRED is a large online database of economic data hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The website currently hosts approximately "672,000 US and international time series from 89 sources."

Access to the raw data is available through the FRED API. fred-rs is an intermediate layer between the HTTPS client and the user application. Requests to the FRED API are made through structured calls to the fred_rs FredClient and data is returned as usable data objects (structs).

Usage

use fred_rs::client::FredClient;
use fred_rs::series::observation::{Builder, Units, Frequency, Response};
 
// Create the client object
let mut c = match FredClient::new() {
    Ok(c) => c,
    Err(msg) => {
        println!("{}", msg);
        return
    },
};
 
// Create the argument builder
let mut builder = Builder::new();
 
// Set the arguments for the builder
builder
    .observation_start("2000-01-01")
    .units(Units::PCH)
    .frequency(Frequency::M);
 
// Make the request and pass in the builder to apply the arguments
let resp: Response = match c.series_observation("GNPCA", Some(builder)) {
    Ok(resp) => resp,
    Err(msg) => {
        println!("{}", msg);
        return
    },
};

Request Parameters

All endpoints use the builder approach to construct the API URL. Each builder method corresponds to a paramter that can be added to the API request.

In the example above, three parameters are added to the request, observation_start, units and frequency. The FRED API Documentation explains the possible parameters for each endpoint. Required paramters (except the tag_names paramter) are passed to the client function itself. In the example, series_id is a required paramter and is passed directly to the client function as "GNPCA". The tag_names parameter available on some endpoints accepts a list of arguments, so it is easier to pass this argument to the builder.

API Key

Developers need to request an API Key in order to access FRED. This can be done at https://research.stlouisfed.org/docs/api/api_key.html.

fred-rs looks for the FRED_API_KEY environment variable by default. The environment variable can be set with the following line in Bash.

export FRED_API_KEY=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456

Alternatively, the FredClient.with_key() function allows the key to be set from a string reference.

use fred_rs::client::FredClient;
 
let mut client = match FredClient::new() {
    Ok(c) => c,
    Err(msg) => {
        println!("{}", msg);
        return
    },
};
 
client.with_key("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456");

Issues/Bugs/Improvments/Help/Questions

If you discover any issues or bugs, want to suggest any improvements, or have questions about the crate, feel free to open a GitHub issue or email me directly at matthewdsabo@gmail.com with fred-rs in the subject line.

License

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this crate by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

Modules

category	Get a category
client	Functions and definitons related to the persistent client
related_tags	Get the related tags for one or more tags
release	Get a release of economic data
releases	Get all releases of economic data
series	Get an economic data series
source	Get a source of economic data
sources	Get all sources of economic data
tags	Get all tags, search for tags, or get tags by name