authentication.mdx

title	Authentication
description	How to authenticate with the Checkly CLI
sidebarTitle	Authentication

Before you can use the Checkly CLI, you need to authenticate with your Checkly account. There are different ways to authenticate depending on the environment where you are running the CLI from.

Interactive

When running the CLI interactively from your dev environment, just use the built-in login command. If you have multiple Checkly accounts, it will prompt which account you want to target.

npx checkly login

Once authenticated, you can switch between accounts using:

npx checkly switch

... or quickly find out which account you are currently targeting with:

npx checkly whoami

To log out and clear your stored credentials:

npx checkly logout

From CI

You can also authenticate using environment variables, which is useful for CI/CD pipelines and automated environments.

You will need to export two environment variables in the shell:

• CHECKLY_API_KEY
• CHECKLY_ACCOUNT_ID

To get your API key, go to your Settings page in Checkly and grab a API key from the API keys tab and your Account ID from the Account settings tab.

Set the account ID and API key as follows:

# Set your Checkly API key
export CHECKLY_API_KEY=your_api_key_here

# Set your Checkly account ID
export CHECKLY_ACCOUNT_ID=your_account_id_here

To verify you're properly authenticated:

npx checkly whoami

This will display your account information and confirm your authentication status.

Troubleshooting

If `npx checkly login` doesn't automatically open a browser window to authenticate, you can generate a direct link instead.

When prompted with:

Do you want to open a browser window to continue with login? (Y/n)

Enter "n". The CLI will provide a link that you can copy and paste into your browser to authenticate.