# IBM Cloudant

## Authenticating to Cloudant <a href="#authenticating-to-cloudant" id="authenticating-to-cloudant"></a>

There are two authentication methods available for connecting to Cloudant: IBM Cloudant Legacy and IBM Cloud IAM.

### IBM Cloudant Legacy <a href="#ibm-cloudant-legacy" id="ibm-cloudant-legacy"></a>

Set the User and Password to your service credentials.

To create an IBM Cloudant service credential:

1. In the IBM Cloud dashboard, go to the Menu icon > Resource List, and open your IBM Cloudant service instance.
2. In the menu, click Service credentials.
3. Click New credential and enter a name for the new credential in the Add new credential window.
4. Click Add. This adds your credentials to the Service credentials table.
5. Click Actions > View credentials and extract the User and Password from the JSON file.

### IBM Cloud IAM <a href="#ibm-cloud-iam" id="ibm-cloud-iam"></a>

To connect with IBM Cloud, you will need the ApiKey and the Url of Cloudant instance ( i.e <https://0c9d3837-8304-4aab-a65a-648169970943-bluemix.cloudant.com>). After setting InitiateOAuth to GETANDREFRESH (default), you are ready to connect.

When you connect, the provider completes the OAuth process.

1. Extracts the access token and authenticates requests.
2. Saves OAuth values in OAuthSettingsLocation to be persisted across connections.

After you have created an account in IBM Cloud you should follow the procedure below to retrieve the connection properties:

#### API Key <a href="#api-key" id="api-key"></a>

To obtain the ApiKey, take the following steps:

1. Log in to your IBM Cloud account.
2. Navigate to [Platform API Keys](https://cloud.ibm.com/iam/apikeys) page.
3. On the middle right corner click "Create an IBM Cloud API Key" in order to create a new API Key.
4. In the pop-up window, specify the API Key name and click "Create". Save the ApiKey somewhere as you can never access it again from the dashboard.

### Register a new instance of Cloudant <a href="#register-a-new-instance-of-cloudant" id="register-a-new-instance-of-cloudant"></a>

If you do not already have Cloud Object Storage in your IBM Cloud account, you can follow the procedure below to install an instance of SQL Query in your account:

1. Log in to your IBM Cloud account.
2. Navigate to the [Cloudant](https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/cloudant) page, choose a name for your instance and click Create. You will be redirected to the instance of Cloudant.

#### Local Instances <a href="#local-instances" id="local-instances"></a>

We support Local instances from version 1.1.0 and above.

To authenticate to your local instance:

1. Url: Set to the Url of your local instance. For example: <http://localhost:8006>


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