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openFDA

openFDA is a research project to provide open APIs, raw data downloads, documentation and examples, and a developer community for an important collection of FDA public datasets.

Please note: Do not rely on openFDA to make decisions regarding medical care. Always speak to your health provider about the risks and benefits of FDA-regulated products. We may limit or otherwise restrict your access to the API in line with our Terms of Service.

Contents

This repository contains the code which powers all of the api.fda.gov end points:

  • Python pipelines written with Luigi for processing public FDA data sets (drugs, foods, medical devices, and other) into a JSON format that can be loaded into Elasticsearch.

  • Elasticsearch schemas for the available data sets.

  • A Node.js API Server written with Express, Elasticsearch.js and Elastic.js that communicates with Elasticsearch and provides the api.fda.gov JSON interface (documented in detail at https://open.fda.gov).

Prerequisites

  • Elasticsearch 7
  • Python 3.6 or above
  • Node 14 or above

Packaging

Run bootstrap.sh to download and set up a virtualenv for the openfda python package and to download and set up the openfda-api node package.

Running in Docker

If you intend to try running openFDA yourself, we have put together a docker-compose.yml configuration that can help you get started. docker-compose up will:

  1. Start an Elasticsearch container
  2. Start an API container, which will expose port 8000 for queries.
  3. Start a Python 3 container that will run the NSDE, CAERS, Substance Data, Device Clearance, Device PMA and Device Event pipelines and create corresponding indices in Elasticsearch.

Note: even though the API container starts right away, it will not serve any data until some or all of the pipelines above have finished running. You can curl http://localhost:8000/status to see which endpoints have become available as the pipelines progress or after they have completed running. Once an endpoint becomes available, it can be queried using the standard openFDA query syntax. For example: curl -g 'http://localhost:8000/food/event.json?search=products.industry_name:"Soft+Drink/Water"+AND+reactions.exact:DEHYDRATION&limit=10'

At this point the Python container only runs the NSDE, CAERS, Substance Data, Device Clearance, Device PMA, and Device Event pipelines because most of those are relatively lightweight (except Device Event) and require no access to internal FDA networks. We will add more pipelines in case there is substantial interest from the community. However, the pipelines above provide a good starting point into understanding openFDA internals and/or customizing openFDA.

Linux Users

vm.max_map_count needs to be increased as follows before Elasticsearch can start successfully:

sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144
echo "vm.max_map_count=262144" | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf

Windows Users

Clone the repository with git clone https://github.com/FDA/openfda.git --config core.autocrlf=input in order to circumvent Docker issues with building images on a Windows computer.

Running unit tests

docker-compose --profile test up test will run Python unit tests.