Configuration#

Overview#

Use service client objects to configure your applications.

For example:

>>> from google.cloud import bigquery
>>> client = bigquery.Client()

When creating a client in this way, the project ID will be determined by searching these locations in the following order.

  • GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT environment variable
  • GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS JSON file
  • Default service configuration path from $ gcloud beta auth application-default login.
  • Google App Engine application ID
  • Google Compute Engine project ID (from metadata server)
You can override the detection of your default project by setting the
project parameter when creating client objects.
>>> from google.cloud import bigquery
>>> client = bigquery.Client(project='my-project')

You can see what project ID a client is referencing by accessing the project property on the client object.

>>> client.project
u'my-project'

Authentication#

The authentication credentials can be implicitly determined from the environment or directly. See Authentication.

Logging in via gcloud beta auth application-default login will automatically configure a JSON key file with your default project ID and credentials.

Setting the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS and GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT environment variables will override the automatically configured credentials.

You can change your default project ID to my-new-default-project by using the gcloud CLI tool to change the configuration.

$ gcloud config set project my-new-default-project