Authentication
You'll need to authenticate your requests to access any of the endpoints in the currencyapi API. In this guide, we'll look at how authentication works. currencyapi offers two ways to authenticate your API requests: API key as GET parameter, or via request header.
MULTIPLE API KEYS
While our free plan only allows one API key at a time, our paid plans offer multiple API keys.
By using separate keys for different use cases you can track individual usage and make key rotations affect only certain parts of your application.
GET query parameter
You can pass your API key along with every request by adding it as a query parameter apikey
WARNING
This method could expose your API key in access logs and such. Sending the API key via a header parameter as specified below circumvents this problem.
Example request with authentication via get request
curl "https://api.currencyapi.com/v3/latest?apikey=YOUR-API-KEY"
Please don't commit your currencyapi password to GitHub!
HTTP Header
The recommended way to authenticate with the currencyapi API through a HTTP request header:
Example request with authentication via header
curl "https://api.currencyapi.com/v3/latest" \
-H "apikey: YOUR-API-KEY"
Always keep your token safe and reset it if you suspect it has been compromised.
Using an SDK
If you use one of our official SDKs, you won't have to worry about any of the above — fetch your access token from the currencyapi dashboard and the client library will take care of the rest. All the client libraries use header authentication behind the scenes.