Gemini API quickstart

This quickstart shows you how to get started with the Gemini API using the SDK of your choice.


Prerequisites

This quickstart assumes that you're familiar with running shell scripts.

To complete this quickstart, you must have curl installed in your shell environment.

Set up authentication

The easiest way to authenticate to the Gemini API is to configure an API key, as described in this section. If you need stricter access controls, you can use OAuth instead.

If you don't already have an API key, create one in Google AI Studio.

Get an API key from Google AI Studio

Then, configure your key.

It is strongly recommended that you do not check an API key into your version control system but assign it as an environment variable instead:

export GOOGLE_API_KEY=<YOUR_API_KEY>

Make your first request

Use the generateContent method to generate text.

curl "https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/gemini-1.5-flash:generateContent?key=$GOOGLE_API_KEY" \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -X POST \
    -d '{
      "contents": [{
        "parts":[{"text": "Write a story about a magic backpack."}]
        }]
       }' 2> /dev/null
text_generation.sh

What's next

Now that you're set up to make requests to the Gemini API, you can use the full range of Gemini API capabilities to build your apps and workflows. To get started with Gemini API capabilities, see the following guides:

For in-depth documentation of Gemini API methods and request parameters, see the guides in the API reference.