Cannot authenticate Earth Engine on Mac OSX

Question

Fresh install of Mac OSX Catalina (v10.15.7) Running Anaconda 3 and Python 3.8.10

I install the EE Python API client by doing: conda install earthengine-api

Install is successful

I then try to authenticate by doing running sudo earthengine authenticate from the command line. The web window sign-in prompt appears. I sign in to my account, receive a verification code, paste it into terminal, and receive message: 'Successfully saved authorization token.'

Then, I try to initialize like:

python
import ee
ee.Initialize()

and receive the following traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/anaconda3/envs/rsenv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ee/data.py", line 219, in get_persistent_credentials
    tokens = json.load(open(oauth.get_credentials_path()))
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/Users/my_username/.config/earthengine/credentials'

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/opt/anaconda3/envs/rsenv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ee/__init__.py", line 115, in Initialize
    credentials = data.get_persistent_credentials()
  File "/opt/anaconda3/envs/rsenv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ee/data.py", line 229, in get_persistent_credentials
    raise ee_exception.EEException(
ee.ee_exception.EEException: Please authorize access to your Earth Engine account by running

earthengine authenticate

I tried removing the file /Users/my_username/.config/earthengine/credentials and redoing the process without using sudo. In this case, I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/anaconda3/envs/my_env/bin/earthengine", line 10, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/opt/anaconda3/envs/my_env/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ee/cli/eecli.py", line 84, in main
    _run_command()
  File "/opt/anaconda3/envs/my_env/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ee/cli/eecli.py", line 63, in _run_command
    dispatcher.run(args, config)
  File "/opt/anaconda3/envs/my_env/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ee/cli/commands.py", line 352, in run
    self.command_dict[vars(args)[self.dest]].run(args, config)
  File "/opt/anaconda3/envs/my_env/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ee/cli/commands.py", line 385, in run
    ee.Authenticate(**args_auth)
  File "/opt/anaconda3/envs/my_env/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ee/__init__.py", line 89, in Authenticate
    oauth.authenticate(authorization_code, quiet, code_verifier)
  File "/opt/anaconda3/envs/my_env/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ee/oauth.py", line 235, in authenticate
    _obtain_and_write_token(None, code_verifier)  # Will prompt for auth_code.
  File "/opt/anaconda3/envs/my_env/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ee/oauth.py", line 142, in _obtain_and_write_token
    write_token(token)
  File "/opt/anaconda3/envs/my_env/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ee/oauth.py", line 111, in write_token
    os.open(credentials_path, os.O_WRONLY | os.O_CREAT, 0o600), 'w') as f:
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/Users/my_username/.config/earthengine/credentials'

I also tried a fresh virtual environments and restarting the machine.

My earth engine account is white listed, and I am able to access https://code.earthengine.google.com/

Answer 1

Solved this by changing permissions on the .config directory by running:

$ sudo chown -R my_username .config

Instructions found here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/320682/ownership-of-the-config-folder-in-home-directory