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Logging in

Polars cloud allows authentication through short-lived authentication tokens. There are two main ways to authenticate:

  1. authenticate Loads cached tokens, otherwise opens the browser to log in and caches them
  2. login Opens the browser to log in, caches tokens but does not reuse them

Generally you would use authenticate unless you want to switch between accounts.

Both methods will attempt to authenticate with the following priority:

  1. POLARS_CLOUD_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable
  2. POLARS_CLOUD_CLIENT_ID / POLARS_CLOUD_CLIENT_SECRET service account environment variables
  3. Any cached access or refresh tokens

If all methods fail, the user will be redirected to the browser to log in and get a new access token. If you are in a non-interactive workflow and want to fail if there is no valid token you can run pc.authenticate(interactive=False) instead.

After successful authentication, Polars Cloud stores the token in your OS config directory:

OS Value Example
Linux $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or $HOME/.config/ home/alice/.config
macOS $HOME/Library/Application Support /Users/Alice/Library/Application Support
Windows {FOLDERID_RoamingAppData} C:\Users\Alice\AppData\Roaming

You can override this path by setting the environment variable POLARS_CLOUD_ACCESS_TOKEN_PATH.

Commands

You can authenticate from the terminal:

pc authenticate
pc login

Or in Python:

login 

import polars_cloud as pc

pc.authenticate()
pc.login()

Service accounts

Both flows described above are for interactive logins where a person is present in the process. For non-interactive workflows such as orchestration tools there are service accounts. These allow you to login programmatically. See the page on how to set up and use service acccounts for more information.