libfec

Installing libfec ​

libfec is a command line interface (CLI) for interacting with federal campaign finance data from the FEC. While it's written in Rust, you personally don't need to know or even have Rust installed to use it. Pre-compiled binaries are made available for every libfec release for Windows, MacOS, and Linux users.

Use one of the methods detailed below to install the libfec CLI on your machine.

The easiest way to install the libfec CLI is with the following installation script:

bash
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/asg017/libfec/releases/download/0.0.12/fec-cli-installer.sh | sh

Once ran, you can run the libfec command line by directly calling:

sh
libfec --help

With the libfec PyPi Package ​

If you're a Python user, the libfec PyPi package includes pre-built binaries, so you can pip install libfec the CLI.

If you use uv, you can use uvx for quick-and-dirty one-off scripts:

bash
uvx libfec --help

Or use uv tool install for an alternative global install:

bash
uv tool install libfec
libfec --help

Manually ​

Find a recent release of libfec on the project's Releases page and manually download the correct package for your platform.

Building yourself ​

Ensure you have Rust installed, then run:

bash
cargo install --git https://github.com/asg017/libfec.git fec-cli

Alternatively you can manually clone the repository and run cargo build --release:

bash
git clone git@github.com:asg017/libfec.git
cd libfec
cargo build --release

That will build the libfec CLI on your computer, and will be available at target/release/libfec.