OpenAI API Key

With OpenAI, you're instructed to use an API key to authenticate with their APIs. When you put that string in a .env file, or directly in your code, you risk sharing your API key with the world! 🙅‍♂️

Instead, just put it in your OS keyring, and expose it with keycmd when you run your Python scripts or Jupyter notebooks.

Configuration

Add the key to your OS keyring — see the quick start for how to do that on each platform. Say you store it under the name my-openai-token with username your-username; then this is the .keycmd configuration you need:

[keys]
OPENAI_API_KEY = { credential = "my-openai-token", username = "your-username" }

OPENAI_API_KEY is the variable the OpenAI SDK reads by default, so nothing in your code has to change.

Usage

Now you can run any OpenAI script by just prefixing your command with keycmd:

keycmd python my_openai_script.py

Or a Jupyter notebook:

keycmd jupyter notebook

That's all! 🤘 Now you can rest easily, knowing your tokens are safe. 🛌💤

The same trick works for any SDK

Anthropic's ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, AWS's AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, a Hugging Face HF_TOKEN — anything that reads a credential from the environment is a one-line entry under [keys].