Helicone Authentication

Complete guide to Helicone authentication. Learn about API key types, permissions, regional variations, and alternative authentication methods.

Helicone Auth keys

When creating a new Helicone API key you have the ability to enable read and write permissions.

Write keys can be used through Helicone via our proxy, feedback or any other Helicone service when calling a POST or using our gateway.

When creating a key you can choose whether or not you want to enable reads.

Key’s with read permissions will start with sk- and keys with write permissions will start with pk-.

Helicone Keys in the EU

For our EU customers, keys are generated with the prefix eu- this allows our edge workers to know which region to route the request to.

Using Helicone-Auth not in the header

Typically to authenticate Helicone you will need to add a header called Helicone-Auth. However, in some environments you do not have access to headers, and you only have the ability to change the base URL. In this case, you can actually embed the API key directly into the URL path.

You are now allowed to use a write only key within the URL path to authenticate your requests.

This is done by changing the base URL to https://gateway.helicone.ai/[HELICONE_API_KEY]/v1/ where [HELICONE_API_KEY] is your Helicone API key.

This will work with any of our supported domains.