Caution: As of January 2021, this documentation for the Recommendations Engine API beta is no longer updated. The beta API remains available but does not receive updates.

The GA version of this product, Retail API, is documented here: Retail documentation

If you need to switch to Retail API, see Migrate to the Retail API from beta in the GA documentation.

Recommendations AI client libraries

This page shows how to get started with the Cloud Client Libraries for the Recommendations AI API. Client libraries make it easier to access Google Cloud APIs from a supported language. Although you can use Google Cloud APIs directly by making raw requests to the server, client libraries provide simplifications that significantly reduce the amount of code you need to write.

Read more about the Cloud Client Libraries and the older Google API Client Libraries in Client libraries explained.

Install the client library

Java

See the GitHub README for details about this client library's requirements and install dependencies.

For more information, see Setting Up a Java Development Environment.

PHP

See the GitHub README for details about this client library's requirements and install dependencies.

For more information, see Using PHP on Google Cloud.

Python

See the GitHub README for details about this client library's requirements and install dependencies.

For more information, see Setting Up a Python Development Environment.

Set up authentication

To authenticate calls to Google Cloud APIs, client libraries support Application Default Credentials (ADC); the libraries look for credentials in a set of defined locations and use those credentials to authenticate requests to the API. With ADC, you can make credentials available to your application in a variety of environments, such as local development or production, without needing to modify your application code.

For production environments, the way you set up ADC depends on the service and context. For more information, see Set up Application Default Credentials.

For a local development environment, you can set up ADC with the credentials that are associated with your Google Account:

Install and initialize the gcloud CLI.

When you initialize the gcloud CLI, be sure to specify a Google Cloud project in which you have permission to access the resources your application needs.
Create your credential file:
```
gcloud auth application-default login
```
A sign-in screen appears. After you sign in, your credentials are stored in the local credential file used by ADC.

Additional resources

Java

The following list contains links to more resources related to the client library for Java:

PHP

The following list contains links to more resources related to the client library for PHP:

Python

The following list contains links to more resources related to the client library for Python: