OpenAI API key isn't working...not sure why?

[rossjohnson87]

Hello! I've used my OpenAI API key on a few projects and can confirm it's working and pasted in the .env file correctly. I get this error every time:

Please set your OpenAI API key in config.py or as an environment variable.
You can get your key from https://beta.openai.com/account/api-keys

I've reinstalled requirements and confirmed I have the prerequisites installed...not quite sure why it won't execute. I have done a curl and confirmed the API keys are right. I have an OpenAI paid account, but no access to GPT-4 yet (on the waitlist).

Any ideas what might be the issue? Kind of out of ideas.

[mertkaradayi]

Yeah,same issue when I use docker.
When I normally run the project in mac with python3 it says no module.

[nixyme]

I tried for a long time to find a solution:
Type in the terminal:
export OPENAI_API_KEY=your API key
Just re-run the program:
python scripts/main.py

[rossjohnson87]

I did solve this on my instance, it was two-fold and kind of obvious in hindsight:

1. I had been operating off of the $20 free credit from OpenAI...which I didn't realize had an expiration date (hadn't been used up in terms of amount but demo time expired. Upgrading to a paid account fixed that but it still wasn't picking up my key.
2. The main problem, working on Windows it wasn't saving the .env.template file as .env when I renamed it. I fixed this by renaming it to ".env." without quotes, the period was needed to get it to drop the .template portion and then everything ran fine.

Hope these help in troubleshooting!