fredapi

A Ruby wrapper for the Federal Reserve Economic Data API (FRED).

• Original documenation: http://api.stlouisfed.org/docs/fred/
• Gem documentation: http://rubydoc.info/gems/fredapi

In order to be able to send API requests you'll first need to install the fredapi gem.

gem install fredapi

You will need to register and request an API key in order to requests. To register please click here. Request an API key by following the instructions here.

Once you have completed the steps above, you can now create an instance of a FREDAPI::Client and set your API key as appropriate:

require 'fredapi'
api = FREDAPI::Client.new 'api_key' => '123456789'

If you now look at your FREDAPI object instance it will be similar to the following:

<FREDAPI::Client:0x007ffb89bcf3e0
@adapter=:net_http,
@api_endpoint="http://api.stlouisfed.org/",
@api_key='123456789',
@file_type="json",
@user_agent="FREDAPI Ruby Gem 1.0.0">

By the default the file_type is set to json. This can be easily be changed by simply updating the instance variable to be set to xml:

api.file_type = 'xml'

Please note that when sending any FRED API request if you don't pass an api_key or file_type parameter the values on the FREDAPI::Client instance will be used as default.

Now that you have an FREDAPI::Client instance with your API key you can now make requests to the FRED API. For example to send a category get request do the following:

api.category 'category_id' => 125

The response is returned within a Hashie::Mash instance.

{"categories"=>[{"id"=>125, "name"=>"Trade Balance", "parent_id"=>13}]}

To find out more information about Hashie please visit the following link: https://github.com/intridea/hashie. To see all documention on the various FREDAPI endpoint method calls please visit: http://rubydoc.info/gems/fredapi

There are a number of unit tests which are included as part of this project, please run:

rspec spec

Please note that a number of tests still need to be added so I don't currently have complete coverage, subject to workload these will be slowly added over the next few months.

I would be more than happy to recieve feedback, please email me at: jonathan.chrisp@gmail.com.