This page explains how developers can get started using Google Cloud APIs.
If you are using Google Cloud APIs for the first time, you can follow
the steps in this guide to call the APIs using
curl
commands. You can use
curl
commands to experiment with an API before you develop your application.
Creating a Google account
To use Google Cloud APIs in your applications, you first need to have a
Google account. This allows you to use Google developer products, including
Google Cloud console
,
gcloud CLI
,
Cloud Logging
, and
Cloud Monitoring
. If you're new to Google Cloud,
create an account
to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers
also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.
Creating a Google project
To use Cloud APIs, you also need to have a Google project. A project is
equivalent to a developer account. It serves as a resource container for
your Google Cloud resources. It also provides an isolation boundary for your
usage of Google Cloud services, so you can manage quota limits and billing
independently at the project level. Usage telemetry and dashboards are grouped
by projects as well. If you don't already have a project, you can create one
using the
Google Cloud console
.
A project can own a wide range of resources, including API keys, OAuth clients,
service accounts, Compute Engine VMs, Cloud Storage buckets, and BigQuery
datasets. When an
application calls a Cloud API, the project that owns the application
credentials is called the
client project
, and the project that owns the
target resource is called the
resource project
. One API request may touch
multiple resources, hence multiple resource projects are involved.
If you want to stop using Google Cloud for any reasons, you can use
Google Cloud console
to delete your project. Your
project and all resources in the project will be deleted after the retention
window. Note that different types of data have different retention periods.
Discovering APIs
Before using any Cloud APIs, you should use Google Cloud console
API Library
to
browse available Cloud APIs and discover the ones that best meet your business
needs. For more information about a specific Cloud API, visit its public
documentation site, such as
Spanner API
.
Enabling APIs
Some Cloud APIs are enabled by default. To use a Cloud API that is not enabled
by default, you must enable it for your project. Depending on which
services and which projects are involved from your application, including the
client project and resource projects, you may need to enable an API for
multiple projects. When you enable an API that depends on other APIs, those APIs
are also enabled at the same time.
Enabling an API requires you to accept the Terms of Service and billing
responsibility for the API. You need permission
serviceusage.services.enable
on the project to enable APIs. For more information, see Service Usage
Access Control
.
In addition, the service to enable must either be public, or else the service
owner must grant the user the
servicemanagement.services.bind
permission on
the private service. See
Service Management Access Control
for more
information.
To enable an API for a project using the console:
- Go to the
Google Cloud console API Library
.
- From the projects list, select the project you want to use.
- In the API Library, select the API you want to enable. If you need help
finding the API, use the search field and/or the filters.
- On the API page, click
ENABLE
.
From the same page you can disable an API for your project if you no longer
use it to avoid misuse and accidental billing charges. You can also enable
and disable Cloud APIs using the
gcloud CLI
and the
Service Usage API
:
$ gcloud services enable pubsub.googleapis.com
$ gcloud services disable pubsub.googleapis.com
Enabling billing
Some Cloud APIs charge for usage. You need to enable billing for your project
before you can start using these APIs in your project. The API usage in a
project is charged to the billing account associated with the project.
If you don't have a billing account, go to the
Google Cloud console billing page
and follow the instructions to create one. Then
link your billing account
to your project.
Authenticating to APIs
How you authenticate to an API depends on your development environment and what
authentication methods the API supports.
Setting up
Application Default Credentials
for use in a variety of
environments is the most common approach, and is recommended for most
applications. If the API supports
API keys
, that is another option.
If your application needs to access Cloud resources owned by your end users, you
create an OAuth 2.0 Client ID and use the authentication libraries
.
For general information about authentication, see
Authentication at Google
.
Building applications
If you are building an application using Cloud APIs, we recommend you to use
Google Cloud Client Libraries
if
available. The client libraries can handle common API features for your
convenience, such as authentication, error handling, retry, and payload
validation. You need to pass your application credentials to the client
libraries during initialization, so the client libraries can make calls to
Google Cloud APIs on behalf of your application.
See the following step-by-step guides that use the client libraries for some
popular APIs:
For more information, see
Client Libraries Explained
.