Accounts, keys and money

Member lesson

OpenAI, Hugging Face, Replicate and fal keys

Lesson 4 of 7 in Accounts, keys and money.

Checked against the makers' documentation on 25 September 2026.

Lesson

OpenAI keys are made on the API keys page of platform.openai.com, and every key belongs to a project. When you create one you choose its permissions, All, Restricted (where each part of the API can be set to none, read or write) or Read only, and OpenAI's production guide strongly recommends an expiry date on every project key and replacing it on a schedule. Set one. The SDKs read OPENAI_API_KEY and send it as a Bearer header.

providervariableheaderopenaiOPENAI_API_KEYbearerhugging faceHF_TOKENbearerreplicateREPLICATE_API_TOKENbearerfalFAL_KEYkeyeach library reads its own name, spelled exactly
Four providers, one pattern: OpenAI reads OPENAI_API_KEY, Hugging Face HF_TOKEN, Replicate REPLICATE_API_TOKEN and fal FAL_KEY, each sent in an Authorization header.
An ink drawing of a steel key ring holding four different keys: an old brass key, a blue modern key, a green plastic card with a chip, and a small green rubber fob, lying on a hatched linen ground.
Four providers, four keys, and one habit for all of them.
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Members answer these 3 questions and keep the ticket for this lesson. Every lesson has one.

  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “An OpenAI key that belongs to one project and lives under its limits.”

    • Project key
    • Push protection
    • Secret reference
    • Shell profile
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A Hugging Face token allowed to touch only the repositories you name.”

    • Fine-grained token
    • Shell profile
    • .gitignore
    • .env file
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A Hugging Face token that can download what you can see, and change nothing.”

    • Partner alert
    • Secret scanning
    • Rotate
    • Read token

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