zulip/templates/zerver/api/api-keys.md

API keys

You can create bots on your settings page. Once you have a bot, you can use its email and API key to send messages.

Create a bot:

Look for the bot's email and API key:

If you prefer to send messages as your own user, you can also find your API key on your settings page. When using our python bindings, you may either specify the user and API key for each Client object that you initialize, or let the binding look for them in your ~/.zuliprc, the default config file, which you can create as follows:

[api]
key=BOT_API_KEY
email=BOT_EMAIL_ADDRESS

Additionally, you can also specify the parameters as environment variables as follows:

export ZULIP_CONFIG=/path/to/zulipconfig
export ZULIP_EMAIL=BOT_EMAIL_ADDRESS
export ZULIP_API_KEY=BOT_API_KEY

The parameters specified in environment variables would override the parameters provided in the config file. For example, if you specify the variable key in the config file and specify ZULIP_API_KEY as an environment variable, the value of ZULIP_API_KEY would be considered.

The following variables can be specified:

1. ZULIP_CONFIG
2. ZULIP_API_KEY
3. ZULIP_EMAIL
4. ZULIP_SITE
5. ZULIP_CERT
6. ZULIP_CERT_KEY
7. ZULIP_CERT_BUNDLE