API Keys

Overview

Some BioContext7 features require API keys for authenticated access to external services.

Service	Environment Variable	Required For
Anthropic	`ANTHROPIC_API_KEY`	Pipeline generation (LLM-assisted intent parsing)
OpenAI	`OPENAI_API_KEY`	Alternative LLM provider
NCBI	`NCBI_API_KEY`	Higher rate limits for NCBI queries

Set API keys as environment variables:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="sk-ant-..."
export NCBI_API_KEY="your-ncbi-key"

Add keys to ~/.biocontext7/config.yaml:

api_keys:
  anthropic: "sk-ant-..."
  ncbi: "your-ncbi-key"

For project-specific configuration, use a .env file:

# .env (do NOT commit this file)
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
NCBI_API_KEY=your-ncbi-key

The NCBI API key increases your rate limit from 3 to 10 requests per second.