Set up your API key

You should use an API key to identify yourself when you access data.census.gov. Like many public APIs, the US Census Bureau’s data portal allows anonymous users. However, it limits the number of requests that an anonymous user can send, both per second and per day. If you register with the site, it will send you a key. You can use the key to identify yourself when making future calls. Chances are that you will never come up against any kind of throttling.

To make it easy for new users, hercacstables includes a function, api_key_setup(), that will take you to the sign-up page and then help you permanently save your key as a local environment variable. That variable is called “CENSUS_API_KEY” to be compatible with another popular package for accessing the Census API, tidycensus.

hercacstables::api_key_setup()