Advanced¶
Keep Your API Key Secret¶
Be careful not to include your API key when sharing code. A simple way to ensure this doesn’t happen by accident is to store your API key as an environment variable that can be specified in your .bash_profile or .zshrc file:
export CHEMSPIDER_API_KEY=<YOUR-API-KEY>
This can then be retrieved in your scripts using os.environ
:
>>> api_key = os.environ['CHEMSPIDER_API_KEY']
>>> cs = ChemSpider(api_key)
Specify a User Agent¶
As well as using your API key, it is possible to identify your program to the ChemSpider servers using a User Agent string.
You can specify a custom User Agent through ChemSpiPy through the optional user_agent
parameter to the ChemSpider
class:
>>> from chemspipy import ChemSpider
>>> cs = ChemSpider('<YOUR-API-KEY>', user_agent='My program 1.3, ChemSpiPy 2.0.0, Python 3.6')
Logging¶
ChemSpiPy can generate logging statements if required. Just set the desired logging level:
import logging
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)
The logger is named ‘chemspipy’. There is more information on logging in the Python logging documentation.