FRED

https://fred.stlouisfed.org

The purpose of fred is to have the ability to look at economic data. This page offers 2 options:

predefined
- Get predefined data
cust
- Get custom fred data

The current predefined options are

GDP
1,5,10,30 Year Treasury Rates
30 Year Mortgage Rates
Unemployment Rate
Effective Federal Funds rate
Moody's AAA Corporate Bond
CAD to USD Conversion.

predefined

usage: selected [-n N_TO_GET] [-s START_DATE] [--noplot] [--hidedata]

Gets predefined data. Arguments

selected : Key from the predefined list.
-s : Start Date. Format YYYY-mm-dd. First point to get. Defaults to Jan 1 2019
--noplot : Flag to hide plot
--hidedata : Flag to suppress printing output. Useful for data released daily/weekly.

To plot the 30-Year Mortgage rates since 2018-01-01 suppressing the output.

mort30 -s 2018-01-01 --hidedata

To show all GDP data since 1/1/2016, with no plot.

gdp -s 2016-01-01 --noplot

Output:

                  GDP
Date                 
2016-01-01  18470.156
2016-04-01  18656.207
2016-07-01  18821.359
2016-10-01  19032.580
2017-01-01  19237.435
2017-04-01  19379.232
2017-07-01  19617.288
2017-10-01  19937.963
2018-01-01  20242.215
2018-04-01  20552.653
2018-07-01  20742.723
2018-10-01  20909.853
2019-01-01  21115.309
2019-04-01  21329.877
2019-07-01  21540.325
2019-10-01  21747.394
2020-01-01  21561.139
2020-04-01  19520.114
2020-07-01  21170.252
2020-10-01  21487.896

cust

The fred database has many different datasets freely available. They each have their own custom SERIES_ID which can be obtained through the website.

usage: cust [-i --id] [-s START_DATE] [--noplot] [--hidedata]

-i/--id : Series ID for FRED data. Required argument
-s : Start Date. Format YYYY-mm-dd. First point to get. Defaults to Jan 1 2015.
--noplot : Flag to suppress output plot.
--hidedata : Flag to suppress data output

An example of custom data could be the USD/EURO exchange rate.
According to https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DEXUSEU , the series ID is DEXUSEU. So to plot this from the start of February 2021 to now (3/17)

cust --id DEXUSEU -s 2021-02-01

This will plot and display:

            DEXUSEU
Date               
2021-02-01   1.2070
2021-02-02   1.2020
2021-02-03   1.2025
2021-02-04   1.1974
2021-02-05   1.2035
2021-02-08   1.2045
2021-02-09   1.2106
2021-02-10   1.2132
2021-02-11   1.2127
2021-02-12   1.2126
2021-02-15      NaN
2021-02-16   1.2107
2021-02-17   1.2042
2021-02-18   1.2078
2021-02-19   1.2136
2021-02-22   1.2155
2021-02-23   1.2142
2021-02-24   1.2143
2021-02-25   1.2229
2021-02-26   1.2093
2021-03-01   1.2054
2021-03-02   1.2079
2021-03-03   1.2073
2021-03-04   1.2045
2021-03-05   1.1914
2021-03-08   1.1849
2021-03-09   1.1885
2021-03-10   1.1900
2021-03-11   1.1978

Note the NaN on 2-15, which corresponds to President's Day.