Watson APIs Node.js SDK

Node.js client library to use the Watson APIs.

Before you begin

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

Installation

npm install watson-developer-cloud

Usage

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

Credentials are checked for in the following order:

1. Hard-coded or programatic credentials passed to the service constructor

2. Environment variables:

• SERVICE_NAME_USERNAME and SERVICE_NAME_PASSWORD environment properties
• If using IAM: SERVICE_NAME_IAM_APIKEY and optionally SERVICE_NAME_IAM_URL, or SERVICE_NAME_IAM_ACCESS_TOKEN
• Optionally, SERVICE_NAME_URL

3. IBM-Cloud-supplied credentials (via the VCAP_SERVICES JSON-encoded environment property)

If you run your app in IBM Cloud, the SDK gets credentials from the [VCAP_SERVICES][vcap_services] environment variable.

Client-side usage

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.

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:

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 Discovery instance, you just need to do the following:

const DiscoveryV1 = require('watson-developer-cloud/discovery/v1');
const discovery = new DiscoveryV1({ version: '2019-02-01' });

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.

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="