To help you get started, we've collected the most common ways that ibm-watson is being used within popular public projects.

watson-developer-cloud / node-sdk / examples / natural_language_understanding.v1.js View on Github

'use strict';

var fs = require('fs');
var NaturalLanguageUnderstandingV1 = require('ibm-watson/natural-language-understanding/v1.js');
require('dotenv').config({ silent: true }); //  optional

var nlu = new NaturalLanguageUnderstandingV1({
  // note: if unspecified here, credentials are pulled from environment properties:
  // NATURAL_LANGUAGE_UNDERSTANDING_USERNAME &  NATURAL_LANGUAGE_UNDERSTANDING_PASSWORD
  // username: ''.
  // password: '',
  version: '2018-04-05',
  url: 'https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/natural-language-understanding/api/'
});

var filename = '../test/resources/natural_language_understanding/energy-policy.html';
fs.readFile(filename, 'utf-8', function(file_error, file_data) {
  if (file_error) {
    console.log(file_error);
  } else {
    var options = {
      html: file_data,
      features: {

View more ways to use ibm-watson

Watson APIs Node.js SDK

Deprecated builds

Node.js client library to use the Watson APIs.

Before you begin

• You need an [IBM Cloud][ibm-cloud-onboarding] account.

Prerequisites

• Node >= 20: This SDK is tested with Node versions 16 and up. It may work on previous versions but this is not officially supported.

Installation

npm install ibm-watson

Usage

import AssistantV2 from 'ibm-watson/assistant/v2';
import { IamAuthenticator } from 'ibm-watson/auth';

const assistantClient = new AssistantV2({
  authenticator: new IamAuthenticator({ apikey: '{apikey}' }),
  version: '{version}',
});

// ...

The [examples][examples] folder has basic and advanced examples. The examples within each service assume that you already have service credentials.

Client-side usage

Starting with v5.0.0, the SDK should work in the browser, out of the box, with most bundlers.

See the examples/ folder for Browserify and Webpack client-side SDK examples (with server-side generation of auth tokens.)

Note: not all services currently support CORS, and therefore not all services can be used client-side. Of those that do, most require an auth token to be generated server-side via the Authorization Service.

Authentication

Watson services are migrating to token-based Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication.

• With some service instances, you authenticate to the API by using IAM.
• In other instances, you authenticate by providing the username and password for the service instance.
• If you are using a Watson service on ICP, you will need to authenticate in a specific way.
• If you are using a Watson service on AWS, you will need to authenticate using mcsp.

Authentication is accomplished using dedicated Authenticators for each authentication scheme. Import authenticators from ibm-watson/auth or rely on externally-configured credentials which will be read from a credentials file or environment variables.

To learn more about the Authenticators and how to use them with your services, see the detailed documentation.

Getting credentials

To find out which authentication to use, view the service credentials. You find the service credentials for authentication the same way for all Watson services:

1. Go to the IBM Cloud Dashboard page.
2. Either click an existing Watson service instance in your resource list or click Create resource > AI and create a service instance.
3. Click on the Manage item in the left nav bar of your service instance.

On this page, you should be able to see your credentials for accessing your service instance.

In your code, you can use these values in the service constructor or with a method call after instantiating your service.

Supplying credentials

There are two ways to supply the credentials you found above to the SDK for authentication:

• Allow the credentials to be automatically read from the environment
• Instantiate an authenticator with explicit credentials and use it to create your service

Credentials file (easier!)

With a credentials file, you just need to put the file in the right place and the SDK will do the work of parsing it and authenticating. You can get this file by clicking the Download button for the credentials in the Manage tab of your service instance.

The file downloaded will be called ibm-credentials.env. This is the name the SDK will search for and must be preserved unless you want to configure the file path (more on that later). The SDK will look for your ibm-credentials.env file in the following places (in order):

• Directory provided by the environment variable IBM_CREDENTIALS_FILE
• Your system's home directory
• Your current working directory (the directory Node is executed from)

As long as you set that up correctly, you don't have to worry about setting any authentication options in your code. So, for example, if you created and downloaded the credential file for your Assistant instance, you just need to do the following:

const AssistantV2 = require('ibm-watson/assistant/v2');
const assistant = new AssistantV2({ version: '2024-08-25' });

And that's it!

If you're using more than one service at a time in your code and get two different ibm-credentials.env files, just put the contents together in one ibm-credentials.env file and the SDK will handle assigning credentials to their appropriate services.

Special Note: Due to legacy issues in Assistant V1 and V2, the following parameter serviceName must be added when creating the service object:

const AssistantV2 = require('ibm-watson/assistant/v2');
const assistant = new AssistantV2({
  version: '2024-08-25',
  serviceName: 'assistant',
})

It is worth noting that if you are planning to rely on VCAP_SERVICES for authentication then the serviceName parameter MUST be removed otherwise VCAP_SERVICES will not be able to authenticate you. See Cloud Authentication Prioritization for more details.

If you would like to configure the location/name of your credential file, you can set an environment variable called IBM_CREDENTIALS_FILE. This will take precedence over the locations specified above. Here's how you can do that:

export IBM_CREDENTIALS_FILE="