U.S. Inflation Tracker

Overview

This project is a web application that visualizes U.S. inflation data from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) API. The user can view inflation trends over a custom period of time (e.g., 2020 to 2024) and see normalized inflation rates.

Features

• Fetches U.S. inflation data from FRED API.
• Allows users to select a custom date range to visualize inflation.
• Plots the normalized inflation data (relative to the selected time period).
• Interactive and dynamic visuals generated with Matplotlib.
• Environment variables for API key management.

Table of Contents

1. Requirements
2. Installation
3. Getting Your API Key
4. Running the Application
5. Testing
6. Screenshots
7. License

Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• Flask
• Matplotlib
• Pandas
• Requests
• Dotenv

Installation

1. Clone this repository:

   git clone https://github.com/ivansing/inflation-tracker.git
   cd inflation-tracker

2. Create a virtual environment

   python3 -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate # on Windows use: venv\Scripts\activate

3. Install -r requirements.txt

Getting Your API Key

To access U.S. inflation data, you need a FRED API key. Follow the steps to get yours:

1. Go to [FRED website](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/)
2. Create a free account or sign in if you already have one.
3. Navigate to My Account > API Keys.
4. Click on Reuqests API Key and follow the instructions to generate your key.
5. Once you have the API key, copy it into the `.env` file as shown below.

Running the Application

1. Set up the .env file in the root directory with your FRED API key:

   API_KEY=your_fred_api_key_here

2. Run the Flask application:

   python3 app.py

3. Visit the app in your browser at http://127.0.0.1:5000.

4. Enter the desired start and end years in integer values on the UI to see inflation trends.

Testing

You can test the application by running it locally and entering a custom date range (for example, 1990 to 2024) in the web interface to see how the inflation data is plotted.

Screenshots

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more information.