Setting GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS for BigQuery Python CLI

I'm not sure about BigQuery, but i'm using Google Data Store for saving. If you've installed gcloud sdk in your mac, you can try running this command

gcloud auth application-default login

First - Thanks for the code - this provided to be very useful. I would also suggest adding setting the environmental variable directly in your code - as not to set it for every environment you work on. you can use the following code:

import os
os.environ["GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS"] = "path_to_your_.json_credential_file"

I found this useful when switching between different projects that require different credentials.

Note: oauth2client is deprecated, instead of GoogleCredentials.get_application_default() you can use google.auth.default(). Install the package first with:

pip install google-auth

In your specific example, I see you know where the JSON file is located from your code. Instead of default credentials (from environment variables), you can use a service account directly with the google.oauth2.service_account module.

credentials = google.oauth2.service_account.Credentials.from_service_account_file(
    './Peepl-cb1dac99bdc0.json',
    scopes=['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform'])

You can use this credentials file just as you are currently doing so by passing them to googleapiclient.discovery.build or if you are using the google-cloud-bigquery library, pass the credentials to the google.cloud.bigquery.Client constructor.

It's looking for the environment variable in your local UNIX (or other) environment, not a variable in your python script.

You'd set that by opening up your terminal or cygwin and doing one of the following:

export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS='/path/to/your/client_secret.json'

Type that into your terminal to set the variable for just this session

Open up your .bashrc file, in UNIX by typing in nano ~/.bashrc and add this line to it underneath user specific aliases if you see that header:

GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="/full/path/to/your/client_secret.json"

Then reload it by typing source ~/.bashrc and confirm that it's set by trying echo $GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS. If it returns the path, you're good.