Using my Google Geocoding API key with Python geocoder

Question

I'm a beginner at Python and I've been working to geocode a database using Pandas and Geocoder on Jupyter.

Since the df is a little long (around 3000 rows), I'd like to use Google's Geocoding API.

I've already created a free key, but I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with it. Help?

By the way, my code looks like this:

import geocoder
import pandas as pd

geo = geocoder

df=pd.read_excel('hsp2.xlsx')

df['Coordinates']=df['Address'].apply(geo.google).apply(lambda x: x.latlng if x != None else None)

df.to_csv('output.csv', sep='|', encoding='iso8859_15')

Answer 1

You need to set the environment variable before you import geocoder:

import os

os.environ["GOOGLE_API_KEY"] = "api_key_from_google_cloud_platform"

import geocoder

geo = geocoder.google(address)
latlong = geo.latlng

Note:

As Murmel mentioned in the comments, environment variables containing keys (and in general) should not be set inside of your code.
If you are deploying this somewhere then set up enviroment variables in your configuration file. Or even better, as a secret in something like Kubernetes.

Else set the environment variable in bash with
export GOOGLE_API_KEY=api_key_from_google_cloud_platform

Answer 2

Basically there are 2 options:

• passing the API KEY as environment variable:

  GOOGLE_API_KEY=YOUR-API-KEY-HERE  python your_program.py
  

• passing the API KEY as argument:

  geocoder.google('some address', key='YOUR-API-KEY-HERE')
  

---

Details

1. You are using the python library called geocoder, which itself is a wrapper around multiple geocoding services.

2. If you look at the pypi page of geocoder, you can (ignoring the rendering problems) find the docs for geocoder. In your case you probably want to have a look at the Google related part of the docs.

3. For basic usage this seams to work even without an API KEY, but you can specify one using 2 variants:

   • Environment variable: Like Roman already showed. This approach is meant to be used to not have the API KEY in code - for security reasons. (Probably you want to upload your code into a public repository, but without exposing your API KEY to everyone.)

   • "Key" parameter: You can also provide your API KEY by specifying it using the key parameter, like:

     geocoder.google('some address', key='YOUR-API-KEY-HERE')