API key usage tutorials?

[jGaboardi]

@walkerke Thanks for all the awesome stuff you do with pygris, tigris, tidycensus, etc.!

One of colleagues (cc @brelsford) is mentoring a PhD student who has been using tidycensus but running into issues with her census API key for several weeks. Are there any intro-level resources to understand API key usage that you can recommend we share with here, particularly for the US census?

cc @ljwolf @knaaptime @jvtcl

[walkerke]

Thanks @jGaboardi! Likewise, I've been promoting your work (spopt in particular) quite a lot recently.

About the API key:

• As of tidycensus v1.3, an API key is no longer required, though you'll hit a limit of 500 queries per day. If you are having API key issues but need to do some one-off work, you can remove the CENSUS_API_KEY line from your .Renviron file.
• In 90%+ percent of cases where I've helped users debug this, they have entered the wrong API key accidentally (e.g. cutting off some characters). I would double-check that.
• In some cases, however (see https://github.com/walkerke/tidycensus/issues/160) the API key mysteriously does not work sometimes, but works other times. I have never experienced this issue and neither has Matt (my co-author) so we've had difficulty debugging it. I have occasionally seen this issue pop up when users are on a shared server version of R that is potentially hitting the Census API quite a lot.

There is a bit more on this in this doc: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/data/developers/api-user-guide/api-guide.pdf (see the section on "Query Limits"). They mention that issues can arise if lots of queries appear to be coming from a shared IP address (e.g. within the same organization), so that might be something to look into.

[jGaboardi]

Awesome! I will pass the info along! Thanks again for taking the time to write this up. I am sure it will be useful for more folks.

[brelsford]

@walkerke thanks very much for the thorough response. This ought to be enough to help my student through these challenges.