Watson Developer Cloud Python SDK

Deprecated builds

Python client library to quickly get started with the various [Watson APIs][wdc] services.

Before you begin

• You need an [IBM Cloud][ibm-cloud-onboarding] account. We now only support python 3.5 and above

Installation

To install, use pip or easy_install:

pip install --upgrade ibm-watson

or

easy_install --upgrade ibm-watson

Note the following: a) Versions prior to 3.0.0 can be installed using:

pip install --upgrade watson-developer-cloud

b) If you run into permission issues try:

sudo -H pip install --ignore-installed six ibm-watson

For more details see #225

c) In case you run into problems installing the SDK in DSX, try

!pip install --upgrade pip

Restarting the kernel

For more details see #405

Examples

The [examples][examples] folder has basic and advanced examples. The examples within each service assume that you already have service credentials.

Running in IBM Cloud

If you run your app in IBM Cloud, the SDK gets credentials from the [VCAP_SERVICES][vcap_services] environment variable.

Authentication

Watson services are migrating to token-based Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication.

• With some service instances, you authenticate to the API by using IAM.
• In other instances, you authenticate by providing the username and password for the service instance.

Getting credentials

To find out which authentication to use, view the service credentials. You find the service credentials for authentication the same way for all Watson services:

1. Go to the IBM Cloud Dashboard page.
2. Either click an existing Watson service instance in your resource list or click Create resource > AI and create a service instance.
3. Click on the Manage item in the left nav bar of your service instance.

On this page, you should be able to see your credentials for accessing your service instance.

Supplying credentials

There are three ways to supply the credentials you found above to the SDK for authentication.

Credential file

With a credential file, you just need to put the file in the right place and the SDK will do the work of parsing and authenticating. You can get this file by clicking the Download button for the credentials in the Manage tab of your service instance.

The file downloaded will be called ibm-credentials.env. This is the name the SDK will search for and must be preserved unless you want to configure the file path (more on that later). The SDK will look for your ibm-credentials.env file in the following places (in order):

• The top-level directory of the project you're using the SDK in
• Your system's home directory

As long as you set that up correctly, you don't have to worry about setting any authentication options in your code. So, for example, if you created and downloaded the credential file for your Discovery instance, you just need to do the following:

assistant = AssistantV2(version='2024-08-25')

And that's it!

If you're using more than one service at a time in your code and get two different ibm-credentials.env files, just put the contents together in one ibm-credentials.env file and the SDK will handle assigning credentials to their appropriate services.

If you would like to configure the location/name of your credential file, you can set an environment variable called IBM_CREDENTIALS_FILE. This will take precedence over the locations specified above. Here's how you can do that:

export IBM_CREDENTIALS_FILE="