TigerFetch

This package downloads TIGER/Line shapefiles from the US Census Bureau FTP server.

This was written for personal use and to learn about julia's capabilities to generate cli tools. Thus the package is fairly lean and does not convert shapefiles into dataframes or GeoJSON. The package has only been tested for the 2024 files, but could be extended to accomodate other vintages. For serious use, you'd probably be better off using tigris

What the package does is provide a convenient interface to pull file from the Census. You can always check what is directly available on the ftp server.

Installation

You can either use the package through the command line (and stay away from julia) or you can use it from within julia.

Command line tool

Install the command line tool (you need a julia installation for this)

mkdir -p /.local/share/julia # or some other directory 
git clone [email protected]:louloulibs/TigerFetch.jl.git  ~/.local/share/julia
cd ~/.local/share/julia  && julia --project deps/build.jl install

The binary will available at ~/.julia/bin/tigerfetch but also depends on the downloaded packages. An easier way is to install the package directly from julia.

Julia package

TigerFetch.jl is a registered package. You can install from the my julia registry loulouJL via the julia package manager:

> using Pkg, LocalRegistry
> pkg"registry add https://github.com/LouLouLibs/loulouJL.git"
> Pkg.add("TigerFetch")

If you don't want to add a new registry, you can install it directly from github:

> import Pkg; Pkg.add("https://github.com/louloulibs/TigerFetch.jl#main")

Then install the cli tool with

using TigerFetch; TigerFetch.comonicon_install()

Usage

Command line tool

You can use it

~/.julia/bin/tigerfetch --help
~/.julia/bin/tigerfetch state --output tmp
~/.julia/bin/tigerfetch cousub --state IL --output tmp 
~/.julia/bin/tigerfetch areawater --state "Minnesota" --output tmp # 10,000 lakes
~/.julia/bin/tigerfetch areawater --state "MN" --county "Hennepin" --output tmp 

Julia package

Look at the doc or at the test suite (specifically UnitTests/downloads.jl).

This issue tracks which geographies have been implemented thus far.