Authentication

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Overview

All API calls to your Pinecone index authenticate with an API key for the project containing the target index. If you are using a Pinecone client, you can initialize a client object, which allows you to provide your API key in one place and use it multiple times. If you are making HTTP requests with a tool like cURL, the HTTP request must include a header that specifies the API key. This topic describes each method.

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Find your Pinecone API key

1. Open the Pinecone console.
2. Select your project.
3. Go to API Keys.
4. Copy your API key.

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Initialize a client

To initialize a client with your API key, use the following code:

from pinecone import Pinecone

pc = Pinecone(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")

Function calls with this client use the authentication information provided at initialization. For example:

# Creates an index using the API key stored in the client 'pc'.
pc.create_index(
    name="docs-auth-index",
    dimension=8,
    metric="cosine",
    spec=ServerlessSpec(
        cloud='aws', 
        region='us-east-1'
    ) 
) 

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Add headers to an HTTP request

When issuing an HTTP request to Pinecone, each request must contain an Api-Key header that specifies a valid API key and must be encoded as JSON with the Content-Type: application/json header.

curl -s -X POST "https://api.pinecone.io/indexes" \
   -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
   -H "Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
   -d '{
         "name":  "docs-auth-index",
         "dimension": 8,
         "metric": "cosine",
         "spec": {
            "serverless": {
               "cloud":"aws",
               "region": "us-east-1"
            }
         }
      }'

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Next steps

• Learn more about using the Pinecone Python client.
• Learn more about using the Pinecone Node client.
• Learn more about using the Pinecone Java client.