fred

This MCP server provides universal access to the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) time series through three dedicated tools: fred_browse, fred_search, and fred_get_series. You can browse the complete catalog of series by categories, releases, or sources, search for indicators by keywords or tags, and retrieve data for any FRED series with optional transformations and date filters. When using Streamable HTTP transport, you interact with the server via HTTP requests to the /mcp endpoint, sending JSON-RPC style payloads to initialize a session and then call the available tools. The server exposes the three tools in a consistent interface and supports common paging and filtering options for large results sets.

Prerequisites:

• Node.js (and npm/pnpm as needed) installed on your system
• Access to a FRED API key

Manual installation steps:

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/stefanoamorelli/fred-mcp-server.git
cd fred-mcp-server

2. Install dependencies (pnpm is used in the project; you can adapt to npm/yarn as needed):

pnpm install

3. Build the project:

pnpm build

4. Obtain a FRED API key from https://fred.stlouisfed.org/docs/api/api_key.html and create a config file or environment setup to provide FRED_API_KEY.
5. Run with Node (example):

node build/index.js

6. If you prefer Docker, see the Docker usage instructions in the README to run the server with a key environment variable.

Tips and common issues:

• You must provide a valid FRED_API_KEY via environment variable FRED_API_KEY when starting the server.
• If using Docker, replace <your-key-here> with your actual API key and ensure the container has network access.
• When using Streamable HTTP transport, you can customize the port with the PORT environment variable (default 3000).
• The MCP tools support common parameters such as limit, offset, order_by, sort_order, and various series-specific filters. Review the README's tool sections for exact parameters.
• If you encounter rate limits or API errors from FRED, consider caching results or implementing client-side retries with backoff.
• For CLI/SDK usage, the server follows standard MCP JSON-RPC structure: initialize, then call tools/list or specific tool methods with appropriate params.