Authentication overview

The Imply Polaris API provides programmatic access to working with tables, files, and ingestion tasks in Polaris. To interact with the Polaris API, you must first authenticate your application. Polaris supports both basic and bearer HTTP authentication schemes.

Basic authentication with API keys

Polaris recommends using API keys to authenticate to the Polaris API. With this authentication method, you pass the API key as the username value in the HTTP header of your API request. You do not provide a password. To learn more about key-based authentication in Polaris, see API key authentication.

OAuth authentication with access tokens

With the OAuth authentication method, you create an OAuth client and obtain an access token. You then pass the access token in the Authorization header of your API request. To learn more about authenticating via OAuth, see OAuth authentication.

This method is not suitable for creating long-lived tokens; use API keys instead because they never expire.