Permanently save googleway API key

Question

Is there any way to permanently save the API key to my R profile or environment so that I don't have use set_key() every session? I don't like to save keys in my code since it is on github.

Answer 1

You could put it in your First function, which is located in your Rprofile.site file.

I'm not sure what platform you are on, but this should work

rfile <- list.files(path = Sys.getenv("R_HOME"), recursive = TRUE, 
                    full.names = TRUE, pattern = "Rprofile.site")
file.edit(rfile)

Rprofile.site should now be open in your editor. NOTE: you may need to adjust file permissions of the file on your system in order to write to it(save it)

Add this to the .First

# Things you might want to change
# options(papersize="a4")
# options(editor="notepad")
# options(pager="internal")
# set the default help type
# options(help_type="text")
.First <- function(){
  # Your string api key
  google_api_key <- "12345"
  # Use assign to explicitly set the environment in which to populate the key
  assign("my_google_key", google_api_key, envir = .GlobalEnv)
}

Save the file and restart R

Edit

If your api key is an Token object, such as oauth, simply save to a file and read in and assign to the google_api_key value. Such as:

.First <- function(){
  # Your oauth api key read in from file
  google_api_key <- readRDS("~/.hide_google_token.rds")
  # Use assign to explicitly set the environment in which to populate the key
  assign("google_oauth_token", google_api_key, envir = .GlobalEnv)
}