Not able to activate API Key for Planet Labs with Python

Question

Here's the tutorial: https://www.planet.com/docs/api-quickstart-examples/cli/

Install the Planet CLI with:

pip install planet

If you have not already, get your API key at planet.com/account, and add it to your environment:

export PL_API_KEY=a3a64774d30c4749826b6be445489d3b # (not a real key)

This 'export' does not work (is not showing to be a variable). I manually entered my PlanetLabs API Key in my os environment (https://planetlabs.github.io/planet-client-python/api/examples.html#importing-the-api), but no happy end.

Answer 1

From the Python 3 environment, you can do this:

os.environ['PL_API_KEY']='YOUR_API_KEY_HERE'

Answer 2

How you set an environment variable is dependent on what shell you are using. The instructions in the documentation may not be valid for you, since they assume you are using bash.

As an alternative, you can run planet init to store your credentials in a configuration file.