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For Developers‎ > ‎How-Tos‎ > ‎

API Keys

Some features of Chromium use Google APIs, and to access those APIs, either an API Key or a set of OAuth 2.0 tokens is required. These instructions apply to Chromium version 23 and higher.

You can specify the API keys to use either when you build Chromium, or at runtime using environment variables. First, you need to acquire keys for yourself.

The keys you acquire are not for distribution purposes and must not be shared with other users.

Acquiring Keys

  1. Make sure you are a member of chromium-dev@chromium.org (you can just subscribe to chromium-dev and choose not to receive mail). For convenience, the API below are only visible to people subscribed to that group.
  2. Make sure you are logged in with the Google account associated with the email address that you used to subscribe to chromium-dev.
  3. Go to http://developers.google.com/console
  4. Click “Create project...”
  5. Optionally, you may add other members of your organization or team on the Team tab.
  6. In the Services tab, click the On/Off slider for each of the following APIs so that it is in the On position, and read and agree to the Terms of Service that will be shown:
    • Chrome Remote Desktop API
    • Chrome Spelling API
    • Chrome Suggest API
    • Chrome Sync API
    • Chrome Translate Element
    • Google Maps Geolocation API (requires enabling billing but is free to use; you can skip this one, in which case geolocation features of Chrome will not work)
    • Safe Browsing API
    • Speech API
      If these aren't shown, recheck step 1.
  7. Go to the API Access tab.
  8. Click the button to create an OAuth 2.0 client ID.
  9. You can use a product name such as “My Chromium Build”. You can skip the product logo. In the second step, specify Installed Application, then Other for the installed application type.
  10. Within the API Access tab, you should now have a box titled “Client ID for installed applications”. In the next sections, we will refer to the values of the “Client ID” and “Client secret” fields in this box later (below).
  11. Also within the API Access tab, you should have a box titled “Simple API Access” (if you don’t, click “Create new Browser key...” and leave the text box blank. The next sections will refer to the value of the “API key” field too.

    Note that the keys you have now acquired     are not for distribution purposes and must not be shared with other users.

Providing Keys at Build Time

If you are building Chromium yourself, you can provide keys as part of your build configuration, that way they are always baked into your binary. To do this, specify a few variables to gyp (there are three ways to do this; see the Setup section on this page). One easy way is to create, or edit, the file ~/.gyp/include.gypi (or C:\Users\yourusername\.gyp\include.gypi if you’re on Windows), with contents like the following:

{
 'variables': {
   'google_api_key':               'your_api_key',
   'google_default_client_id':     'your_client_id',
   'google_default_client_secret': 'your_client_secret',

   # … other variables you may have ...
 },
}

where the text “(your API_KEY)” is replaced with your API_KEY value, and so forth.

Once you’ve done this, run gclient sync or gclient runhooks, and your builds after that will use your keys.

Note that the above is equivalent to providing more flags gyp, i.e. build/gyp_chromium -Dgoogle_api_key='...' -Dgoogle_default_client_id='...' -Dgoogle_default_client_secret='...' . 

Depending on the way you build Chromium, the latter may be more practical for you.

Providing Keys at Runtime

If you prefer, you can build a Chromium binary (or use a pre-built Chromium binary) without API keys baked in, and instead provide them at runtime. To do so, set the environment variables GOOGLE_API_KEY, GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_SECRET to your "API key", "Client ID" and "Client secret" values respectively.

Getting Keys for Your Chromium Derivative

Many of the Google APIs used by Chromium code are specific to Google Chrome and not intended for use in derived products.  In the API Console (http://developers.google.com/console) you may be able to purchase additional quota for some of the APIs listed above.  For APIs that do not have a "Pricing" link, additional quota is not available for purchase.
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