This guide provides all required setup steps to start using Natural Language.
About the Google Cloud Console
The Google Cloud Console, is a web UI used to provision, configure, manage, and monitor systems that use Google Cloud products. You use the Google Cloud Console to set up and manage Natural Language resources.
Create a project
To use services provided by Google Cloud, you must create a project.
A project organizes all your Google Cloud resources. A project consists of the following components:
- a set of collaborators
- enabled APIs (and other resources)
- monitoring tools
- billing information
- authentication and access controls
You can create one project, or you can create multiple projects and use them to organize your Google Cloud resources in a resource hierarchy. For more information on projects, see the Resource Manager documentation.
In the Google Cloud Console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.
Enable billing
A billing account is used to define who pays for a given set of resources, and it can be linked to one or more projects. Project usage is charged to the linked billing account. In most cases, you configure billing when you create a project. For more information, see the Billing documentation.
Make sure that billing is enabled for your Cloud project. Learn how to confirm that billing is enabled for your project.
Enable the API
You must enable the Cloud Natural Language API for your project. For more information on enabling APIs, see the Service Usage documentation.
Enable the Cloud Natural Language API.Set up authentication
Any client application that uses the API must be authenticated and granted access to the requested resources. This section describes important authentication concepts and provides steps for setting it up. For more information, see the Google Cloud authentication overview.
About service accounts
There are multiple options for authentication, but it is recommended that you use service accounts for authentication and access control. A service account provides credentials for applications, as opposed to end-users. Service accounts are owned by projects, and you can create many service accounts for a project. For more information, see Service accounts.
About roles
No role is required to access the Cloud Natural Language API. Authenticated users or applications can make calls to the API, regardless of their permissions.
About service account keys
Service accounts are associated with one or more public/private key pairs. When you create a new key pair, you download the private key. Your private key is used to generate credentials when calling the API. You are responsible for security of the private key and other management operations, such as key rotation.
Create a service account and download the private key file
Create a service account:
-
In the Cloud Console, go to the Create service account page.
Go to Create service account - Select a project.
-
In the Service account name field, enter a name. The Cloud Console fills in the Service account ID field based on this name.
In the Service account description field, enter a description. For example,
Service account for quickstart. -
Click Done to finish creating the service account.
Do not close your browser window. You will use it in the next step.
Create a service account key:
- In the Cloud Console, click the email address for the service account that you created.
- Click Keys.
- Click Add key, then click Create new key.
- Click Create. A JSON key file is downloaded to your computer.
- Click Close.
Use the service account key file in your environment
Provide authentication credentials to your application code by
setting the environment variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS.
Replace [PATH] with the file path of the JSON file that contains your
service account key. This variable only applies to your current shell session,
so if you open a new session, set the variable again.
Linux or macOS
export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="[PATH]"
For example:
export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="/home/user/Downloads/my-key.json"
Windows
With PowerShell:
$env:GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="[PATH]"
For example:
$env:GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="C:\Users\username\Downloads\my-key.json"
With command prompt:
set GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=[PATH]
Install and initialize the Cloud SDK
If you plan to use the Natural Language API,
you need to install and initialize the Cloud SDK.
Cloud SDK is a set of tools that you can use
to manage resources and applications hosted on Google Cloud.
This includes the gcloud command line tool.
The following link provides instructions:
Test the SDK and authentication
If you have set up authentication in previous steps,
you can use the gcloud tool to test your authentication environment.
Execute the following command and verify that
no error occurs and that credentials are returned:
gcloud auth application-default print-access-token
That command is used by all Natural Language command line REST samples to authenticate API calls.
Install the Natural Language API client library
You have three options for calling the Natural Language API:
- Google supported client libraries (recommended)
- REST
- gRPC
The client libraries are available for several popular languages. For information on installing the client libraries, see Cloud Natural Language Client Libraries.