Adding Google Maps API Keys to Python program

Question

I am trying to obtain Google Street View images of a route between Point A and Point B, and make them into a video.

I found this repository which does exactly what I want. The author mentions that:

Lastly, and trickiest of all: the code requires API keys for Google Map's Street View and Directions APIs. Note: setting up the Street View API now requires a billing account! it tends to be free for small amounts of traffic, but you have to set it up anyway.

I managed to set up a Google Maps API key, and following instructions from Google's website here, I was able to make queries of the form

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/streetview?size=400x400&location=47.5763831,-122.4211769
&fov=80&heading=70&pitch=0&key=YOUR_API_KEY&signature=YOUR_SIGNATURE

and obtain the image that I want.

Now, in the Python code, there's a file street_crawl.py, where the following code is present:

import sys
from utils import *
from API_KEYS import API_KEY_DIRECTIONS, API_KEY_STREETVIEW

'''Google Street View Movie Maker
Usage is:
    python2 ./street_crawl.py lat1 lon1 lat2 lon2 output_filestem
For example, to make a one-second video of the entrance of Joshua Treet National Park:
    python2 ./street_crawl.py 33.669793 -115.802125 33.671796 -115.801851 joshua_tree
Note: usage requires your own API keys.
'''

def main(lat_lon_A, lat_lon_B, filestem, picsize):
    print "Tracing path from ({0}) to ({1})".format(lat_lon_A, lat_lon_B)
    # Request driving directions from A to B
    gd = googlemaps.Client(key=API_KEY_DIRECTIONS)

I tried running the code as it is given and it gave me an error that:

ImportError: No module named API_KEYS

My question here is - how do I enter my own API key here? Should I just replace the last line with:

gd = googlemaps.Client(key="MY API KEY HERE")

and comment out the call to from API_KEYS import API_KEY_DIRECTIONS, API_KEY_STREETVIEW ?

Or do I have to create a module(file?) called API_KEYS and add my keys in some specific format there?

I am new to Python, so any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Obviously the idea of the project is to have a API_KEYS.py where you will define API_KEY_DIRECTIONS and API_KEY_STREETVIEW (i.e. the keys for respective APIs). They should have documented it better. Note that this file is included in .gitignore of the project.

Also, just FYI note that there are number of ways to deal with [hiding] API keys from the source code - they decided to use this one.